Two pharmaceutical giants, the American Pfizer and the British AstraZeneca, announced on Sunday that they were committing to invest several hundred million additional euros in health in France, on the occasion of the seventh Choose France summit aimed at promoting foreign investments.
The Pfizer laboratory indicates in a statement that it plans to invest 500 million euros in five years to develop research collaborations and increase clinical trials in anticancer therapies and hematology.
“Our intention is to significantly increase the proportion of French centers in our main international clinical studies in oncology,” said Reda Guiha, president of Pfizer in France, quoted in the statement.
This additional investment should also “accelerate patient access to therapeutic innovations, particularly to treat sickle cell anemia, the most common form of inherited blood disease, and multiple myeloma, the most common type of plasma cell tumor in the world.” today,” he adds.
Two new assembly and packaging lines
Known for its Covid-19 vaccine in collaboration with the German biotechnology company BioNTech, the group also wants to “continue its investments in the manufacturing of pharmaceutical products in France.”
During previous editions of Choose France, Pfizer committed to investing more than one billion euros (520 million over five years announced in 2022 and 500 million over four years announced in 2023). To date, more than three quarters of this amount, that is, “more than 730 million euros, have already been allocated to projects” of R&D, clinical trials and pharmaceutical production in France, underlines the group, which does not It has its own factory in France.
Pfizer, which employs 1,000 people in France, says it dedicates around 40% of its R&D investments to oncology. AstraZeneca, for its part, announced a new investment of 388 million dollars (more than 360 million euros) to develop and “greener” all production at its Dunkirk (north) plant dedicated to respiratory diseases.
“This new investment will be dedicated in particular to the creation of two new assembly and packaging lines”, as well as “new buildings”, which will generate “a hundred jobs”, explains the group in a statement.
This brings the investments made in France since 2020 to “more than 2.2 billion dollars” (more than 2 billion euros), according to the laboratory, which has more than 2,000 employees in the territory.
Source: BFM TV
