Sanofi and Translate Bio
Deal value: $3.2 billion
Premium: 56% over average price over previous 60 days
Date announced:Aug. 3, 2021
Sanofi had a stop-start relationship with mRNA player Translate Bio since the two began working together but went all-in in August with a $3.2 billion offer to buy the company outright, putting the deal on our top-10 list.
The deal came after mRNA vaccines had a transformative effect on the COVID-19 pandemic—and after Sanofi's own coronavirus vaccine efforts using a traditional vaccine tech stumbled—although the French drugmaker's interest in the category dates at least back to the start of its partnership with Translate in 2018.
Their original agreement covered up to five mRNA-based vaccines for infectious diseases including influenza and also generated a COVID-19 candidate that, despite promising proof-of-concept data, was shelved in September because it would arrive too late to the market to warrant the expense of late-stage development.
Sanofi paid $45 million upfront when the deal was signed and spent another $425 million in the early months of the pandemic to accelerate the COVID-19 project, building a stake in Translate via a $125 million equity deal.
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It was ready to pare down the alliance in 2021, reaching an agreement to sell a quarter of its holding. Instead, it opted to buy Translate outright so it could serve as the core of its new mRNA Center of Excellence and accelerate its move into the category.
At the time the deal was announced, analysts at Leerink said that while Translate's technology does not have the same recognition as that from Moderna and BioNTech—which have reaped huge profits from their COVID-19 vaccines—it is a clinically validated platform with broad utility across pulmonary, hepatic and intramuscular applications.
The closure of the acquisition in September 2021 also provided Sanofi with significant in-house manufacturing capacity.
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A monovalent flu vaccine from the alliance called MRT5400 advanced into clinical testing in July 2021, with the next stage of the phase 1/2 trials due to get underway this year and a phase 3 trial scheduled to start in 2023. A quadrivalent candidate is also due to start human testing shortly.
Sanofi-Translate claimed MRT5400 was the first mRNA-based flu vaccine to start clinical trials, although its lead is short. Moderna released preliminary data from its rival program in December 2021 and is preparing for larger studies. Meanwhile, Pfizer-BioNTech and CureVac also have programs on the go.
Infectious diseases aside, Sanofi has ambitions to extend the mRNA platform into areas like immunology, oncology and rare diseases. The deal also gives Sanofi a cystic fibrosis candidate that delivered phase 1/2 data in 2021 but didn’t excite investors. Other programs are looking at rare pulmonary diseases, with discovery research in diseases that affect the liver.
Earlier this year, Sanofi also cut a smaller $470 million deal to buy Tidal Therapeutics, which developed proprietary nanoparticles to deliver mRNA-based medicines to tissues.