“The sale of Yposkesi to foreign capital, another French pharmaceutical defeat”

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Tribune. French pride was touched upon learning that neither the Institut Pasteur nor the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi had been able to develop a vaccine preventing infection due to the new coronavirus. We have to content ourselves with filling bottles, a final phase of production with low economic added value.

But there is another singular French defeat, it is that of the cession of Yposkesi to foreign capital, only four years after the creation of this biotechnology drug manufacturing company. After chaotic years which did not allow this beautiful industrial tool to take off, the funds provided by SK, a chaebol Korean (conglomerate), which takes 70% of the capital, allow us to envision a better future. Yposkesi employees in Evry (Essonne) have found a smile again.

What made this daring French project fail? Couldn’t we have found other ways?

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The shareholders, AFM-Téléthon and BPI, threw in the towel. They had brought Telethon donor money supplemented by public money in 2016 to create Yposkesi. In reality, it was not a creation, but a transfer of Généthon’s pre-industrial activities.

Confused management

Généthon is the spearhead of research institutes funded by AFM-Telethon. A great success since its creation thirty years ago, with products marketed thanks to licenses given to large American industrialists, more competent in development and richer to carry out the expansion of Généthon’s discoveries.
Généthon has made it possible to advance research in gene therapy, a very innovative approach for serious genetic diseases, finally making it possible to treat suffering children.

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But you can do good research while being poor industrializers. This is what undermined the Yposkesi project: under-investment, unsuitable industrial design, insufficient technical resources for the “scale-up” (entry into the phase of regular growth), confused management, heavy governance.

For a long time, however, the State wanted a biotechnological production sector to be strengthened, but the opposite happened: in 2019 already, the LFB, a biopharmaceutical group wholly owned by the State, has sold CellForCure, another industrial gene therapy establishment, to the Swiss pharmaceutical group Novartis.

Let’s not go it alone

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