CRO Novalix has acquired a Sanofi facility in Strasbourg, France it will turn into a headquarters and base of research services operations.
The 3.7 acre site – which will be renamed the Guy Ourisson Research Campus – will serve as Novalix main headquarters and as its scientific research center. It will also be base for several therapeutic innovation labs.
In addition, the facility will house the Biophysics Institute for Biomedical Research a unit co-founded with an academic group, which focuses on medical innovation arising from advances in cryo-electron microscopy.
The contract research organization (CRO) has hired DeA architects to transform the site to meet its need in a construction project expected to start later this year.
Novalix president and co-founder Stephan Jenn citied both growth and corporate strategy as the main drivers for the investment.
“Novalix gets the chance to accelerate its development, make use of new biological and pharmacological capacity, and therefore strengthen its position as a CRO.”
“This campus serves as a manifesto, it promises a new way of organizing discovery research and offers a one-stop location, bringing stakeholders together in order to foster the emergence and success of therapeutic innovation.”
DEL bouyed
The deal will also see Novalix provide Sanofi with a range of research and development services, including for the DNA-encoded library (DELs) focused research partnership the firms announced at the end of last year.
DEL technology is used in drug discovery to verify therapeutic targets and identify new biologically active molecules. DELs provide access to a wide range of chemotypes at a far lower cost per point than High-Throughput Screening (HTS).
Sanofi and Novalix plan to around fifty chemical libraries, containing a total of approximately 1.5 billion compounds with the potential for development into candidate biopharmaceutical products.
In December 2020, Novalix invested €5.3 million ($6 million) to expand its DEL platform.
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