Haro on the flu! Eclipsed by the pandemic in 2020, the winter virus is making a tentative comeback this season. However, in recent months it has become the new target to be shot down by pharmaceutical laboratories. After having supplanted the French Sanofi, the German Merck and the British GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the historic leaders of the vaccine, in the race for the cure once morest Covid-19, the pioneers of messenger RNA, carried by the success of their technology, tackle the one once morest the flu. And they are determined to dethrone their elders on this juicy market.
The incursion of messenger RNA biotechs into this private domain, whether it is the champions of Covid-19, the American Moderna and the German BioNTech, or more confidential laboratories such as the American Arcturus Therapeutics, is not entirely new. BioNTech has already been working on this since 2018, as part of a partnership with the American Pfizer. But the arrival on the market, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, of the first messenger RNA vaccines, relaunched the hunt, forcing the sector’s bridgeheads, Sanofi and the British Seqirus and GSK, to accelerate their research in the field, in order to mitigate the threat.
The German CureVac, which concluded a collaboration agreement with GSK in July 2020, has just started, this month, in Panama, phase I trials of a messenger RNA vaccine once morest influenza. Sanofi, for its part, acquired, in the summer of 2021, for an amount of 2.7 billion euros, the American Translate Bio, a specialist in this new technology, with which it had launched the first tests of an influenza vaccine candidate in June. Seqirus should begin a phase I during the year for a self-amplified messenger RNA influenza vaccine.
“Between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths each year”
This feverish beat is not insignificant. Sanofi, Seqirus and GSK, which today provide most of the flu vaccines administered each year in the world, are not ready to give up this flourishing market. In 2021, sales of seasonal flu vaccines brought in 2.6 billion euros for Sanofi, or nearly 7% of the pharmaceutical company’s turnover. For its competitor Seqirus, they amounted to nearly 1.4 billion euros. A market that is all the more coveted as demand continues to grow. According to the estimates of the French manufacturer, it might reach, for the flu, 15 billion euros in 2030.
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