With former Merck KGaA CEO Belén Garijo, M.D., Ph.D., now calling the shots at Sanofi, the French drugmaker continues to refine its executive roster, albeit with fewer high-profile C-suite departures now than earlier in the year.
On Tuesday, Sanofi unveiled a firmed-up executive roster, to be effective Sept. 1, that confirms previously disclosed shakeups in the roles of R&D chief and EVP of specialty care, while the remits of several other company veterans, like vaccine chief Thomas Triomphe, have been expanded.
Triomphe, in addition to maintaining his longstanding role as Sanofi’s EVP of vaccines, will now assume responsibility for China, too, the company said in a July 21 release.
Meanwhile, Madeleine Roach, presently the company’s head of business operations, is set to assume the title of president and country lead for Sanofi in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Roach’s current duties—which Sanofi says revolve around “optimizing enterprise business services”—will be folded into the company’s finance function, where François Roger will continue to manage the drugmaker’s books as EVP.
Roger will also be put in charge of overseeing global partnering and business development, which Sanofi figures could help create a more “integrated approach” to dealmaking.
Elsewhere, the firm’s EVP of general medicines, Olivier Charmeil, will pivot to become strategic projects advisor to the CEO. Charmeil had served as interim CEO earlier this year before Garijo landed in the captain’s seat.
In the only departure included in the latest round of C-suite adjustments, Sanofi’s present EVP and general counsel, Roy Papatheodorou, is leaving “to pursue external opportunities” following a more than four-year stint at the company.
Paul Fontoura and Manuela Buxo, Sanofi’s new heads of R&D and specialty care, respectively, are not new additions to the final executive lineup, but their appointments mark two of the more noteworthy changes in the upper echelons of the company after news broke that its board had ousted former CEO Paul Hudson in February.
At the time, Sanofi said it believed Garijo would bring “increased rigor” to execution of the company’s goals, with her priorities set to strengthen productivity, governance and innovation capacity for R&D in particular.
Also in February, Sanofi replaced Brian Foard with Buxo as the lead for its specialty care unit after Foard accepted an external leadership opportunity. Sanofi’s specialty care unit, which Buxo will be overseeing, houses the company’s key immunology blockbuster Dupixent, partnered with Regeneron.
More recently, Sanofi in June revealed that its previous R&D chief, Houman Ashrafian, Ph.D., has decided to pursue an opportunity outside of the company, with Sanofi planning to slot Fontoura—a former Roche executive—into the role on Sept. 1.
Hudson’s exit earlier this year was driven in large part by a string of high-profile Sanofi R&D setbacks, which continued to pile pressure on a company seeking to line up a replacement for its Dupixent cash cow before an expected loss of exclusivity early next decade.