When Dr. Monika Vnuk, Sanofi’s senior vice president of global partnering and business development, stepped into her new role in January, she set her sights on creative dealmaking and elevating the company’s “maturing pipeline,” which includes 78 clinical-stage projects and 24 in phase 3 or awaiting approval.
“To me, every deal or endeavor needs to start with the why. Why are we doing this and what is the strategic fit?” she said. “Then we need to ask ourselves how good the science is and how transformative it will be for patients. We spend a lot of time on that question, because it’s very important that what we do as a company, and what we do as an industry, delivers value for patients. If it is a transformative therapy for patients, that element puts a deal over the edge.”
In her new role, Vnuk is charged with overseeing Sanofi’s out-of-the-box partnership with Blackstone Life Sciences — a private life sciences investing platform — which is centered around Sarclisa, an anti-CD38 antibody for multiple myeloma (MM). The $329 million risk-sharing agreement, announced in March 2022, provided an infusion of capital to further the entire Sarclisa platform, and if it’s successful, Blackstone will receive royalties on sales of the subcutaneous version, which is still in clinical development. Sarclisa is already approved for MM and is in trials for a number of additional indications, including other solid tumors and hematologic malignancies.
"To me, the best business development organizations are the ones that become a true thought partner to the business."
Dr. Monika Vnuk
SVP of global partnering and business development, Sanofi
In addition to managing Sanofi’s business development and partnering activities, Vnuk’s team keeps an eye on opportunities with early-stage companies through SanofiVentures.
“Our SanofiVentures team develops deep and trusted relationships with the biotech ecosystem … interacting with entrepreneurs who may not be ready to do a partnering deal but can benefit from working with a big pharma in a different way,” she said. “The Sanofi Ventures team is another lever we can pull on to position ourselves as a partner of choice in the biotech ecosystem.”
Vnuk also has her eye on the burgeoning arena of artificial intelligence.
“AI is becoming a daily headline, not just in the pharmaceutical industry. Digital and AI will be the two technologies that will benefit our industry as well as the economy,” she said. “So, we have formed a number of partnerships, and we are being very thoughtful in making those early investments in AI.”
Ultimately, though, Vnuk believes the foundation for every partnership is built on trust.
“Signing the deal is just the beginning, then the rest of the work starts,” she said. “For the deal to be a success, the partnership needs to be a success. And that’s where the trust comes in. It also needs to make financial sense. We do deals to bring transformative products to patients, but we also have multiple stakeholders around the table, and one of them is our shareholders.”
Here, Vnuk shares the key strategies she’s building in the new role, the partnership trends she’s tracking and her goals for the next few years.
This interview has been edited for brevity and style.
PHARMAVOICE: How are you making the global role your own?
DR. MONIKA VNUK: I’m approaching the role with a strategic mindset. To me, the best business development organizations are the ones that become a true thought partner to the business. This requires understanding who we are as a company. It’s this knowledge about ourselves and the knowledge of the broader ecosystem that leads to understanding what opportunities are out there to partner on.
I spend a lot of time with my team ensuring that we interact with the business strategically. Externally, I’m focusing the team on being very creative, collaborative and transparent with our partners. It’s important to me that our partners always know where we stand in terms of our level of interest, how the asset that the partner is developing fits within our organization, why we are doing the deal from a strategic perspective and what the process of partnering with Sanofi will look like and what to expect. This is all important in building trust.
What makes the Blackstone partnership so different?
It’s a different model because Blackstone is not a pharmaceutical company (or a) biotech company — it’s a financial player. It doesn’t participate in executing the development of the asset, unlike our more traditional partners, but nonetheless it shares risks and costs to support us in the development. These deals can be very effective for both partners. They have been done more so by U.S.-based companies. I think Sanofi is probably one of the pioneers among the non-U.S. multinationals that has done this type of deal. It’s unusual for a European player to do a deal like this.
You note AI and digital are key drivers for the future. How can Sanofi and other companies avoid missteps in that realm?
The field is just starting out. We’re looking for companies that have incredible management, that have had some early successes and have compelling value propositions. We partnered with Owkin, which has a first-class management team, is very creative (and) capable, and they’re helping us think through and find novel targets by looking at patient samples and data. That partnership is all about thinking about new targets.
Our other partners — Atomwise, Insilico Medicine and Exscientia — have platform technologies that lend themselves to designing chemical entities using AI to optimize or maximize the chances to interrogate a specific target. Again, the selection criteria are very similar — excellent management teams and technical capabilities. We take a stepwise approach, doing a collaboration and focusing on a few targets initially, and then potentially expanding to bigger partnerships to deliver either a novel target or a novel chemical entity that we can put into the clinic.
What are your goals for the remainder of 2023 and 2024?
Our largest therapeutic area is inflammation and immunology — and that’s where we want to both augment our pipeline and focus on innovative science to support the next generation of assets. We’re also focusing on our vaccines franchise. We will have some exciting launches this year in RSV for infants and we want to augment that franchise with some later-stage assets. And we will execute around our rare and neurotherapeutic areas as well as look at oncology. These are our priorities in that order. We want to get some earlier stage deals and some later-stage deals done to augment the pipeline and continue to set us on a growth trajectory for the latter half of the decade.
What partnership trends are you tracking?
The trend we’ve been observing for the past few years is a significant increase in valuations of late-stage assets, and I think it’s (a) trend that will continue, which is not a surprise. Sanofi is in a very fortunate position where we don’t have LOEs (loss of exclusivity) for the remainder of the decade. Aubagio (for multiple sclerosis) is our last LOE that we’re going to manage through this year. That is not the case for our peers and there’s a lot of blockbuster products going off patent between now and 2030, and that creates a lot of pressure to replenish those top lines and a lot of competition for later stage assets.
