After a successful test drive in 2021, Sanofi is shifting its partnership with McLaren Racing into high gear.
The French pharma has partnered with the Formula One racing team to boost "efficiency and performance in support of the company’s ambition to attain world-class standards of manufacturing,” Sanofi said Tuesday.
With last year’s McLaren Racing pilot now in the rearview mirror, the companies are extending their collaboration across multiple sites in seven countries that cover “more than 100 production lines” across all technologies, Sanofi noted in a release.
Sanofi aims to leverage McLaren’s racing wisdom to tune up manufacturing practices across its global industrial network, the French pharma giant said.
Under the collaboration, McLaren will work with Sanofi’s industrial affairs team to keep manufacturing optimization rolling, Sanofi said. This will both help shore up supply of approved Sanofi drugs and hasten the delivery of investigational meds from the company’s pipeline.
McLaren will specifically tap its digital and analytical know-how to help Sanofi “better anticipate and resolve issues before they take place," Sanofi said.
“I see a lot of commonalities in our shared values to stretch, with courage and determination, so we can maximize performance and operational excellence,” Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson said of McLaren in a company statement. Sanofi wants to run its manufacturing lines with the “speed, precision and efficiency of an F1 racing team," he added.
Sanofi has been busy on the manufacturing front lately. Apart from its McLaren deal, Sanofi is beefing up vaccine production at a pair of so-called Evolutive Vaccine Facilities (EVFs) in France and Singapore. The company is investing about $976 million in both plants, with work on the Singapore facility now underway.
The Singapore EVF is poised to become a “first-of-its-kind,” fully digitalized and modular vaccine production plant that will be able to crank out shots for the continent on a large scale, the company said earlier this month.
Meanwhile, McLaren is no stranger to the pharma circuit. Take the team's collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline, for instance, which also sought to instill a pit stop mentality on the production line.