NEWS OF THE WEEK
SANOFI
SANOFI SHEDS UNWANTED FACILITY PHARMACEUTICALS: $275 million
deal includes transfer of French R&D team and compound library ANOFI, ONE OF EUROPE’S largest drug companies, has found a home for an unwanted R&D facility in France. The company will pay Evotec, a German pharmaceutical services firm, $275 million over five years, including $45 million up front, to manage its small-molecule drug development site in Toulouse. As part of the deal, first disclosed in December, Sanofi will transfer its team of 208 chemists and other researchers in Toulouse to Evotec. Sanofi will retain ownership of the Toulouse site, which in recent years the company has transformed into a biotech park. Evotec will take over Sanofi’s screening-compound library, combining it with its own to create a collection of about 1.7 million druglike compounds. Evotec will be responsible for developing a portfolio of Sanofi’s oncology compounds. Sanofi retains the
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Researchers at Sanofi’s Toulouse site.
MOF NEUTRALIZES CHEMICAL WEAPONS ACS MEETING NEWS: Porous catalyst
The large pores in this MOF (below, left) enable organophosphate nerve agents to reach internal catalytic sites where they are neutralized via hydrolysis (reaction on right). Blue = Zr, red = O, gray = C, white = H, orange = P, green = F.
degrades toxic nerve agents
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METAL-ORGANIC FRAMEWORK (MOF) com-
NAT. MATER.
pound catalyzes decomposition of the most toxic chemical warfare agents with record-setting efficiency, according to research presented at the American Chemical Society national meeting last week in Denver. The findings may lead to new types of filtration media for gas masks and to improved procedures for destroying stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Chemical weapons based on organophosphate nerve agents such as soman, also known as GD, rank among the most toxic compounds known. The activated carbon and metal oxides widely used today in gas mask filters provide a measure of protection against these CEN.ACS.ORG
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option of acquiring successful compounds or seeking a third party to develop them further. The researchers in Toulouse will also work for other Evotec drug discovery customers. Additionally, an undisclosed share of the $275 million will fund projects with academic institutions in France. By off-loading the Toulouse R&D team to Evotec, Sanofi sidesteps its previous agreement with unions and the French government not to cut R&D staff at the site. The drug company’s goal in recent years has been to reduce payroll costs for small-molecule R&D in France while boosting its biologic drug activities. Today 72% of Sanofi’s R&D projects are in biologics. “The deal with Evotec is an elegant way to satisfy all parties involved,” says Martin Hall, a senior life sciences analyst for London-based Hardman & Co. “Following the spate of consolidation at Sanofi over the past decade, the company has been left with far too many research and manufacturing sites around the world.” The annual price being paid to Evotec is probably less than half the cost of running the Toulouse site, Hall adds. Toulouse is the second French site that Sanofi has stepped away from in recent years. In 2008 it sold sites in Porcheville, France, and Alnwick, England, to New Jersey-based Covance in a 10-year outsourcing deal worth up to $2.2 billion.—ALEX SCOTT
nerve agents. But scientists are looking to develop materials with greater capacity for trapping and chemically neutralizing nerve agents. MOFs, which are porous crystalline materials composed of metal ions or clusters joined by organic linking groups, could meet those needs. At a symposium sponsored by the Division of Physical Chemistry, Northwestern University’s Omar K. Farha reported on NU-1000, a new MOF built from Zr6 clusters linked by para-benzoate pyrene ligands. It features uncommonly wide channels measuring 31 Å in diameter (Nat. Mater. 2015, DOI: 10.1038/nmat4238). The large openings enable organophosphates to gain access to internal catalytic sites, where Lewis acidic Zr(IV) centers decompose the molecules via hydrolysis. In MOFs with smaller pores, such sites are largely inaccessible. Farha and coworkers showed that in aqueous solution, NU-1000 acted 960 times as fast as a common Cubased MOF. And in humid air, which closely simulates gas mask conditions, it neutralized GD 80 times as fast as the Cu-based MOF. T. Grant Glover, a specialist in nanoporous materials at the University of South Alabama, Mobile, noted that NU1000 is among the most active solid catalysts known to hydrolyze GD. The study also shows how MOFs, which are mainly used in gas separation and storage, are now being tailored for diverse applications.—MITCH JACOBY
MARCH 30, 2015
