Sanofi Looks To New Product Roll-Out, Pipeline

French drugmaker Sanofi expects total turnover for 1996 - including licensees' sales - to reach 27.2 billion French francs ($5.27 billion); the company's new product roll-out, more of which later, is expected to have a significant impact on the firm's performance in later years, journalists were told at a presentation in London last week.

Much of the meeting focused on Sanofi's new antiplatelet drug Plavix (clopidogrel), on which CAPRIE study results were presented at the recent meeting of the American Heart Association (Marketletter November 18). Sanofi representatives would go no further in terms of the commercial aspects of Plavix, nor give additional details of its codevelopment deal with US company Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Clopidogrel has demonstrated fewer side effects and superiority (9%) over aspirin in patients at risk of ischemic events, but at this stage Sanofi declined to give any information as to the price the product might command when it comes to market. But given that aspirin, an old and cheap product, is currently the gold standard, this may be a difficult decision. Interestingly, an editorial in the Lancet of November 16, commenting on the CAPRIE study, said: "the paymasters for the trial will need to make the most of what is, even to the most optimistic observer, marginal evidence."