French pharmaceutical company Sanofi has signed an agreement with US drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech to help produce more than 125 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine for the European Union.
Sanofi will provide BioNTech access to its established infrastructure and expertise with the initial supplies set to originate from Sanofi’s production facilities in Frankfurt (situated in proximity to BioNTech’s facilities) from summer of 2021, according to a statement issued by Sanofi on Wednesday.
“We are very conscious that the earlier vaccine doses are available, the more lives can potentially be saved. Today’s announcement is a pivotal step towards our industry’s collective goal of putting all the effort in to curb this pandemic,” said Paul Hudson, the Chief Executive Officer of Sanofi.
The news about the collaboration was first reported by French magazine Le Figaro, which cited an interview with Hundson.
“We asked ourselves how we could make ourselves useful in the present, to participate to the collective effort to end this crisis as soon as possible,” Hudson told the French paper, ruling out, however, the possibility of abandoning the research on their own vaccine candidate against the virus.