The pharmaceutical group Sanofi has installed the financial and supply management unit for the entire group in Barcelona, ??as the axis of the Global Innovation Center (GIC) in which it employs 400 people of 40 different nationalities, as explained this morning by its president Paul Hudson.
Sanofi has unified its teams in Barcelona in a new headquarters in Nou Barris, where 800 people work, which was inaugurated this morning by the Minister of Business and Employment, Roger Torrent and the Councilor for the Economic Area of ??the Barcelona City Council, Laia Bonet. From the GIC in Barcelona, ??the group manages financial and manufacturing processes that now account for 35% of global revenue and expects to reach 90% in two years. Also at the GIC is the group’s Center of Excellence for logistics management, and one of Sanofi’s five Digital R&D groups.
Hudson explained that the group opened the GIC in 2016, with about fifteen people, and since then it has grown exponentially and is one of the most important in the world outside of France.
Last year the group, which Raquel Tapia has led in Spain for a few weeks, invested 50 million euros in R&D in Spain, a figure that has reached 206 million in the last five years. Globally, the firm explained, the annual investment in R&D reaches 6,706 million euros.
Albert Pla, director of new data technologies at the R D center, pointed out that this area was opened a year and a half ago with 10 people and now has 50 employees, who work in collaboration with other teams in the United States, France and China, and they use computational technology to accelerate the identification of drugs and therapeutic targets.
The Clinical Trials Unit, for its part, has 43 employees who manage clinical trials of 40 molecules out of the 84 that Sanofi has globally, monitoring 800 patients, according to Anna Plens, one of the project managers. of the group. Sanofi has 105 clinical studies underway with the collaboration of 594 health centers in Spain and Portugal
Sanofi has four business areas: vaccines, in which it is one of the largest manufacturers in the world; general medicine, which includes drugs for cardiology and diabetes; health self-care, with products such as Bisolvon and specialized medicine, with a special focus on oncology and immunology, especially in the so-called type 2 inflammation, in which it has launched Dupixent, a medicine that attacks the different manifestations of a disease that it causes from asthma to atopic dermatitis or COPD.
Sanofi has invested 26 million euros in the last four years in its Riells i Viabrea (Girona) factory, specialized in the manufacture of tablets and capsules, which today is the main manufacturer of thyroid products for the group. The group plans to invest another 15 million euros in the factory in the coming months, which has 300 workers and exports 94% of its production to 120 countries around the world.
