Sanofi enters a new partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF or the Gates Foundation) and Eisai to join the World Health Organization’s existing Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis in 2020, and further commitments to the World Health Organization (WHO) to eliminate Human African Trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, by 2020.

“I am very pleased with the new partnership announced with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Eisai and the World Health Organization,” said Christopher A. Viehbacher, chief executive officer of Sanofi. “I am convinced that through our partnerships and combined efforts, sleeping sickness and lymphatic filariasis will be eliminated and effective control of other neglected tropical diseases will be achieved.  We are committed to fulfill those ambitions in line with our mission to act with all our partners to protect health and raise the hopes of patients.”

The new partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Eisai will join the WHO’s existing Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis in 2020. This consortium, the first of its kind, will donate in 2012 and 2013, 120 million tablets of DEC (diethylcarbamazine), allowing the WHO to provide treatment for 30 million people. Subsequently, EISAI will begin a Lymphatic Filariasis Elimination Partnership with WHO and will continue to provide DEC at "zero-price" until 2020.

The collaboration between Sanofi and the WHO began in 2001 to battle Neglected Tropical Diseases such as Sleeping Sickness, Leishmaniasis, Buruli ulcer, Chagas disease. Since the start of the partnership, over 170,000 patients have been treated for sleeping sickness, a usually fatal disease if left untreated, and the number of reported new cases of sleeping sickness fell from 30,000 in 2001 to less than 7,200 in 2010.

Sanofi has developed a comprehensive strategy in Access to Medicines based on four pillars: Medicines, Research & Development, Industrial Development, and Information, Education and Communication programs for healthcare professionals and patients.  It is focused on four disease areas: Neglected Tropical Diseases: sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, Buruli ulcer, leishmaniasis and lymphatic filariasis, Pandemic Diseases: malaria and tuberculosis, Chronic Diseases: epilepsy and mental diseases, and Vaccines: dengue and rabies.