Sanofi has launched a ‘digital laboratory’ just outside Paris that will be dedicated to advancing its eHealth work in France.

Known as 39BIS, the lab is a first for both the French pharma company and its home country. It aims to connect Sanofi employees with representatives from a wide variety of other companies and stakeholders within the eHealth environment.

Sanofi’s country chair for France Guillaume Leroy said: “"We are convinced that e-health will make a significant contribution to changing our healthcare system and improving patient care.

“We are proud to make available to everyone 39BIS, a unique place to accelerate the development of e-solutions for healthcare professionals and patients in their life course.”

Sanofi’s eHealth strategy in France is focused on healthcare professionals - including dispensing pharmacists - and medicines, pharmacovigilance, skin disorder diagnosis and exploring diagnostics in rare diseases and vaccines.

As part of its efforts to develop eHealth solutions the firm aims to harness areas such as connected objects, big data, block chain, serious games and artificial intelligence.

Dmd Santé, France eHealth Tech and Umanlife are among the laboratory’s initial external partners and its offering will include a six-month project process.

Isabelle Vitali, director innovation and business excellence at Sanofi France, characterised the space as “a place of daring where one has the right to explore, to experiment or even to err in order to advance”.

Leroy said earlier this year: “In e-health, we are only at the beginning, but the potential is enormous. In France, we already offer e-solutions in our areas of expertise, such as cardiovascular diseases, rare diseases and pain management.

“In diabetes, Sanofi has developed several mobile applications as well as a telemedicine solution that has received a positive opinion for reimbursement in France.”

39BIS is located at the Sanofi’s Val de Bièvre campus just south of Paris in Gentilly, where it offers a showroom, a co-creation ideation space and a prototyping area.

“With this location, we will be able to anchor Sanofi’s digital strategy and interact increasingly with the ecosystem, including startups, schools, incubators and large companies,” Leroy said.

“The 39BIS will offer a scalable offer of services and training to accelerate our ambitions in e-health. It is an important new step in our strong commitment to digital health.”

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