Sanofi names Houman Ashrafian as R&D chief, appoints head of business operations, chief digital officer

Six months after John Reed made a surprise exit, Sanofi has zeroed in on a new head of R&D, recruiting a biotech builder out of SV Health Investors.

Emmanuel Frenehard

Houman Ashrafian, currently a managing partner at SV, will start his new role in September, joining several new members of Sanofi’s executive committee. Emmanuel Frenehard, now global head of digital, has been promoted to chief digital officer. Brian Foard will take over the specialty care global business unit on an interim basis, as Bill Sibold leaves the company to pursue a new opportunity.

Sanofi also promoted Madeleine Roach to the newly created role of head of business operations, where she will be tasked with overseeing a centralized business support unit that brings together existing business services to serve the rest of the company. Roach is relatively new to Sanofi, having joined as head of internal audit and risk management last year from a top finance services role at AstraZeneca. She will start the new position in October.

All four execs will report to CEO Paul Hudson, with Ashrafian, Roach and Frenehard to be based in Paris and Foard to be based in Cambridge, MA.

Dietmar Berger

Dietmar Berger — who has been the interim R&D chief over the past few months — will return to his role as chief medical officer and global head of development.

In a previous interview with Endpoints News, Hudson described 2023 as “one of the most important years” in Sanofi’s history, because it marks the company’s last major loss of exclusivity with the patent on its multiple sclerosis drug Aubagio set to expire. Instead of those established brands, the French drugmaker is keen to prove itself as an industry leader on the science front.

Ashrafian will play a big part in driving 80 clinical programs forward as Sanofi anticipates 27 early- and mid-stage readouts over the next year — all part of a strategy laid out by Hudson and Ashrafian’s predecessor, Reed, in 2019. Reed is now running R&D at J&J.

In a statement, Ashrafian said Sanofi is “more than ever at the cutting edge of drug development” and described the group that he’s set to lead as a “single unified R&D (organization) with hubs in France/EU & US and sites across the world.”

Ashrafian has had a front-row seat to the development of some cutting-edge science, particularly in the immunology field — a key focus for Sanofi. At SV Health Investors, while managing the global private equity and venture capital investment platform, he co-founded Alchemab Therapeutics, Dualitas, Enara Bio, Mestag Therpeutics, Sitryx and TRex Bio, whose focuses span immunotherapy, immunometabolism and Treg-inspired therapies for immune-mediated diseases.

Before joining SV in 2016, Ashrafian had worked as the head of UCB’s clinical science group and co-founded a cardiac services company named Cardiac Report, a startup studying heart failure treatments called Heart Metabolics, as well as an NK cell therapy developer known as Catamaran Bio.

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