We Put 8 Questions to Sanofi’s CEO About the Race for a Vaccine

(Bloomberg) -- With just eight months under his belt as chief executive officer of Sanofi, Paul Hudson finds himself racing the clock to come up with a vaccine to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, and the stakes are massive: A successful shot is the key to the global exit strategy from lockdowns.

The U.S. government, which Hudson describes as a “model” partner, is shouldering some of the risk. Should the drugmaker succeed, the U.S. will likely be first in line to get it due to that support, Hudson said in an interview this week with Bloomberg News. Other regions, he said, may follow only days or weeks later. The company said later that it’s committed to making a vaccine accessible to everyone.

Sanofi has two vaccine candidates, one based on so-called recombinant technology that builds on development work involving the SARS epidemic and a platform the company employs in flu shots. The other uses a novel system known as mRNA, which prompts the body to make a key protein from the virus, sparking an immune response.

Before tackling distribution, Hudson must prove that at least one of the two is safe and effective, overcome supply-chain bottlenecks, determine how to price a shot and convert manufacturing facilities. He spoke with Bloomberg from his home in Paris via video conference.

BLOOMBERG: How are you overcoming bottlenecks to secure the supply chain needed to mass produce a vaccine?

HUDSON: Finding a billion glass vials with approved stoppers is not easy to do. Finding the equipment to put in more fill and finish lines -- not easy to do. We have to move as fast as we can, and we are. We’ve been looking at the multi-dose vial, because you have to. It’s probably not possible now to source 7 billion pre-filled syringes. These make a lot of sense because you’re treating a lot of people quickly, one after another.

BLOOMBERG: What challenges might you encounter when developing, producing and deploying your mRNA vaccine?

HUDSON: You have to store it at minus-80 degrees. It means your point of vaccination narrows. You have to find places that have the right environments and can transport the right way because nobody’s cracked that. It will be cracked, but it just won’t be cracked in time for Covid-19. You need to be going to very, very specialized centers to get it.

If you think of vaccinating the entire global population, that excludes a large part of the population of the world that simply doesn’t have a supply chain that can operate at that temperature.

BLOOMBERG: How are you thinking about pricing a potential vaccine?

HUDSON: The conversations between us and governments have been more about sharing risk and getting on with it and have not been about suspicion and controversy. I can tell you with 100% certainty I have not been in a single meeting about how to price a Covid-19 vaccine. It’s not important right now. So forget it. Move on. We’ll talk about that when we get to further down the line.

BLOOMBERG: How are the discussions going with various countries?

HUDSON: We’re getting phone calls routinely now -- major European markets and much further afield -- I think principally because they know that we have two vaccines, two different platforms, two different technologies. They know we’ve scaled vaccines before so, beyond the science, they know we’re a good bet to make hundreds of millions of doses.

BLOOMBERG: What are the potential risks and rewards in manufacturing a vaccine before it’s been proved effective?

HUDSON: We can already make 600 million doses, and we’re making those in the U.S., and we hope to make 1.2 billion doses. We’ll make the rest of those in Europe, and some additional manufacturing in the U.S. We’re making them with the support of BARDA [the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority], which means we’ll make them before we get the results of the Phase 3, so we don’t even know if the study is going to work. We think it will.

BLOOMBERG: In the past, investments haven’t panned out because epidemics have ebbed before vaccines could be ready.

HUDSON: Sometimes we feel like it’s the mayor who buys the snowplow for the village. If it doesn’t snow, everybody thinks you have wasted the town’s money, and you should have spent it on something else, and you don’t get re-elected. If it snows, you’re the hero.

I don’t expect any government to carry all the risk. I do expect us to share the risk. We’ve just started to have conversations with European governments for the Covid-19 vaccine, and they have to accept that they’d be paying for something that may not work.

BLOOMBERG: We’ve discussed how Sanofi is thinking about meeting demand in the U.S. and Europe. How will it distribute a vaccine across the rest of the world?

HUDSON: We haven’t made it as far as distribution. But mRNA will require more thought. And it won’t be because people want to choose between sub-Saharan Africa and Western Europe, but it may just be because it’s simply technically harder to do. Everyone is going to have to play a part to get the doses. And not just because you want to treat patients in some of these countries to stop them from infecting others, but more because they deserve it just as much as anyone else to get a vaccine.

BLOOMBERG: What’s the likelihood that one of your vaccine candidates succeeds?

HUDSON: We’ve said that we have a probability of success of 60% to 70% on recombinant and 40% to 50% on mRNA. It might be higher for mRNA, but we have to build into the fact that nobody has ever had an approved vaccine on that platform before. We know we’ve made a flu vaccine on the other platform so there is no platform risk. Our probability may indeed be higher than 70%. We would all believe there will be effective vaccines at some point in the first half of 2021. Who and what and how and how many are the questions. Everybody’s doses will be needed. There is no manufacturer that has said they’re going to make 7 billion doses.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.