Sanofi Pasteur MSD ‘to outperform vaccine market’

Sanofi Pasteur MSD, the vaccine company born from a collaboration between Sanofi-Aventis and Merck Sharp and Dohme, aims to outperform the vaccines market and double its sales with the introduction of new products.

The Sanofi Pasteur MSD president, Didier Hoch, said that products such as Gardasil, the human papilloma virus vaccine touted as a prevention for cervical cancer, should be able to drive the growth of the business in coming years.

He told Reuters that the annual vaccine market growth of 13 to 15 per cent could be exceed by his company.

Mr Hoch stated: “We could expect to do more than that because of our new products. We are going to double our sales in the next five years.”

He defended the high prices of some vaccines, saying that their effectiveness made the costs worth paying.

“Price are increasing. We are reaching a level that is interesting for companies but also for countries that will reimburse the products,” he admitted.

Vaccines are becoming an increasingly popular field of investment for large pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Wyeth, according to Reuters.

GlaxoSmithKline, for example, is working on vaccines for both the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu, as well as two HIV vaccines being researched by Cobra Biomanufacturing in Keele, Staffordshire. Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company has also developed a vaccine for the HPV virus that will compete with Sanofi Pasteur MSD’s Gardisil.

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