When the French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi starts moving 2,500 employees from 10 sites in Massachusetts into a pair of new buildings in East Cambridge next month, visitors may notice something missing at the sprawling complex: any mention of Genzyme.
Eleven years after Sanofi bought Genzyme for about $20.1 billion, the parent company said Thursday it will no longer call its specialty care unit Sanofi Genzyme ― just Sanofi, as part of a company-wide rebranding. The move jettisons the name of a storied Massachusetts biotechnology company that helped transform the drug industry in the 1980s and anchored the life sciences cluster that made the region synonymous with innovation.
Sanofi is also dropping the second name of its international vaccines division, Sanofi Pasteur, which had been part of another company that merged with Sanofi in 2004. That unit, named after Louis Pasteur, the 19th century French microbiologist credited with saving millions of lives by developing rabies and anthrax vaccines, helped make Sanofi one of the biggest vaccine makers in the world.
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