Are we seeing the beginning of a lasting health jump? David Simonnet, the boss of Axyntis, wants to believe it. For nearly a year, the teams of this cantor of relocation, equipped with their bottles and their pipettes, have been working in the laboratories of their site of Pithiviers (Loiret) to the development of the processes of synthesis of the adrenaline and noradrenaline. Two crucial molecules in intensive care which were close to shortage during the first wave of Covid-19, in the spring of 2020, and which this specialist in fine chemicals is preparing to repatriate to national soil. “We are going to start producing them in two different forms in the coming months or even weeks. And we are currently starting to work on four other molecules”rejoices the industrialist.
Shortages of masks, respirators, anesthetics… The pandemic has highlighted France’s vulnerability to foreign supplies of health products, the consequence of several decades of serial relocation.
So much so that, at the height of the crisis, French pharmacies even had to ration sales of the basic medicine cabinet, paracetamol (marketed by Sanofi under the Doliprane brand), whose production had deserted the country for nearly fifteen. Quite a symbol.
Between 2005 and 2015, France’s global market share in the manufacture of healthcare products halved, with the country tumbling from first to fourth place in the European rankings. More than 80% of the active ingredients contained in drugs consumed in France are now manufactured outside Europe, mainly in China and India.
This observation prompted the government to begin, at the beginning of the summer of 2020, a major relocation operation in favor of the recovery plan, in order to regain some of the lost pharmaceutical sovereignty. “The pleasant surprise is that during these calls for tenders we received many more proposals than we expected. The health crisis has been an opportunity for manufacturers to carry out in-depth work to identify their capacities and to point out, in the end, that producing once more in France is not insurmountable. Admittedly, it is more expensive, but that is the price of insurance,” explains Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister Delegate for Industry.
Paracetamol, a textbook case
A total of 166 projects, representing 1.4 billion euros of investment (half coming from state support), have been selected by the government over the past eighteen months, including nearly forty – at like the one conducted by Axyntis – relate specifically to the production of critical active ingredients. Among them are the relocation of paracetamol by 2023, gamma-OH, used during anesthesia, or even binimetinib, a molecule essential for the manufacture of certain anti-cancer drugs.
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