Sanofi’s CSO and global head of research Frank Nestle is leaving the company, a representative confirmed to Endpoints News Wednesday.
Nestle first took over both positions in 2020, promoted from his post as the French pharma’s head of immunology and inflammation research therapeutic area, when former CSO Gary Nabel and former head of research Yong-Jun Liu left the company. According to his LinkedIn, Nestle is a senior investigator emeritus at the UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Research. He was also trained as an immunologist and worked as a professor at King’s College London for 12 years.
“Over the past eight years, Frank has shown outstanding leadership and a strong commitment to advancing new medicines on behalf of patients,” Sanofi’s global head of R&D Houman Ashrafian wrote in a statement. “He has played a key role in building a best-in-class research organization at Sanofi and has been a relentless supporter of our Play to Win cultural shift. We are enormously grateful to Frank for his contributions to the R&D organization.”
Fierce Biotech first broke the news of Nestle’s exit — Sanofi’s second major departure this year. CFO Jean-Baptiste Chasseloup de Chatillon stepped down in February after five years. François-Xavier Roger, the former CFO of Takeda, became Sanofi’s new finance chief in April.
Over the past eight years, major overhauls of Sanofi’s R&D have taken place. In 2023, the company said it planned to spin out its consumer health unit and find about €2 billion ($2.1 billion) across its business in order to reinvest those savings back into research. Sanofi is also looking to reallocate resources from oncology to immunology and become an “immunology powerhouse.”
Other more recent changes include Sanofi’s plans to conduct a “full pipeline reprioritization project,” cut jobs, and increase its Phase 3 projects by 50% over the next two years, with a focus on immunology, neurology and vaccines, while dropping oncology assets.