Google, Pharma Giant Sanofi Team Up to Discover Drugs: Brainstorm Health

Happy hump day, readers.

Another big pharma company is seeking reinvention in the digital era. This time around, it’s Sanofi, the French drug mainstay long known for its insulin and diabetes portfolio – but which has faced mounting pressures in a crowded field choc full of competitors.

Now, Sanofi and Alphabet’s Google are teaming up to use data collection and artificial intelligence in a bid to spur drug development and changes in health care delivery.

“Combining Sanofi’s biologic innovations and scientific data with Google’s industry-leading capabilities, from cloud computing to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, we aspire to give people more control over their health and accelerate the discovery of new therapies,” said Sanofi chief medical officer and EVP Ameet Nathwani in a statement.

The purpose of the Sanofi/Google partnership is three-fold and will be conducted with the help of a newly established, virtual Innovation Lab (the companies didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal): better understanding diseases, increasing corporate efficiency, and improving patient/customer experience.

In other words: This is every bit as much of an operational streamlining and high-tech marketing effort (for instance, by using Google technology to better design sales forecasts through the use of real-world datasets) as it is a quest to develop new drugs. And Google’s cloud services will play a large part in that quest, as similar technology expands its role across multiple life sciences companies.

Read on for the day’s news.

Sy Mukherjee

@the_sy_guy

sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com

DIGITAL HEALTH

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INDICATIONS

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THE BIG PICTURE

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