2024 Sanofi Innovation Awards Call for Pre-Proposals

Sanofi is a global life sciences company committed to improving access to healthcare and supporting the people we serve throughout the continuum of care.

Sanofi iAwards initiative is a multi-institutional partnership program designed to support collaborations with academic investigators to accelerate innovative early stage, disease-relevant research towards the clinic. With this program, Sanofi aims to fund cutting-edge translational research that can contribute to our early-stage pipeline and ultimately benefit patients.

Award winning proposals will receive:

  • $150,000 research funding including institutional direct and indirect costs for 12 months.
  • Sanofi R&D expertise and guidance.

Sanofi’s main objective in creating the iAwards program is to convert successful and promising iAwards projects to sponsored research programs and subsequently create in-licensing and start-up opportunities with the potential to continuously enrich Sanofi’s early-stage portfolio.

Pre-Proposal submission:

Provided with this call is the pre-proposal submission template, as well as the areas of interest on page 3.

Only selected members of Sanofi and your Institution will have access to your pre-proposal; however, we recommend that information in the pre-proposal should not contain any confidential information or unpublished results. Pre-proposals should not include third parties except members from other Partner institutions also involved in the iAwards Program (listed on page 4).

All pre-proposals must be submitted by the TTO to Sanofi by June 3rd, 2024 at the latest using this link.

The timelines of the iAwards North America Program 2024-2025 are further described on page 4. Pre-proposals that would not respect the guidelines (format, timelines, etc.) will not be evaluated.

Ares of interest:

IMMUNOLOGY & INFLAMMATION

  • Indications of interest: Dermatology, Gastroenterology, Rheumatology, Respiratory diseases.
  • Novel targets and approaches in autoimmune diseases (e.g., Treg enhancement, tolerance induction, checkpoint modulators etc.) incl. development of complex cellular in vitro co-culture system(s) / organoids.
  • Multi-specific biologics approaches to increase efficacy in treatment refractory patient populations.
  • Tools/Biomarkers for patient stratification or responders / non-responder analysis.
  • Transformational genomic medicine approaches in immunology with deep durable efficacy / remission potential in inflammation & immunology – e.g., novel approaches to in vivo immune cell engineering, including chimeric antigen receptors.

ONCOLOGY – Adult and childhood cancers

  • New therapeutic targets and new cell surface markers for priority indications (Multiple Myeloma, Acute Myeloid Leukemia, gastrointestinal cancers, lung cancers, childhood cancers).
  • New strategies of Immune Cell Engagers (engagers of NK cells, engagers of unconventional immune cells).
  • Novel strategies for targeting tumor micro-environment (including myeloid / macrophages, fibroblast targets, vascular normalization, etc.)
  • Novel in vivo delivery approaches.
  • Novel translational models in Immuno-Oncology.

RARE & NEUROLOGICAL DISEASES

  • Biology, transport mechanisms and delivery of therapeutics to muscle and/or CNS
  • Novel targets and mechanisms for neuroinflammation and/or to achieve neuroprotection in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases including MS, ALS, PD and AD
  • Novel targets, models, and therapeutic concepts for genetically defined CNS or musculoskeletal diseases
  • Novel targets, assays, models, biomarkers, and therapeutic concepts for proteinopathies (synuclein, tau, TDP-43, TMEM106B)

GENOMIC MEDICINE

  • Non-viral delivery (i.e. LNP) approaches for delivery of nucleic acids to extra hepatic tissues including ocular tissue
  • Approaches to obviate LNP immunogenicity including predictive in vitro models.
  • Mechanisms of addressing AAV immunity, immunogenicity, or toxicity.
  • Approaches to minimize AAV dorsal root gangliotoxicity.
  • Predictive models for T and B cell antidrug immune responses.

PRECISION MEDICINE AND COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY

  • Artificial intelligence algorithms to extract biological features from histopathology images of inflamed/disease tissues in immunology conditions.
  • Computational methods for design and off-target analysis of anti-sense oligonucleotides.
  • AI/ML Foundation models for multi-omics target biology and target identification.
  • Tissue and disease-associated protein profiles applied to target identification and credentialing.
  • Patient endotype and therapy response characterization in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and/or other immune conditions.
  • Single cell and spatial characterization of respiratory and autoimmune diseases (i.e., HS, atopic dermatitis, SLE, asthma, COPD).
  • Biofluid analyses to understand immune disease pathologies: etiology, severity, response to treatments.
  • Characterizing disease heterogeneity through unsupervised embeddings of high dimensional multi-model data.

VACCINES

  • Vaccines directed towards chronic diseases:
    • Tolerogenic vaccines to prevent or treat auto-immune diseases or allergy.
    • Strategies to potentiate immune system to eradicate chronic infection.
  • Microbiome-based interventions:
    • Microbiome composition altering therapeutic strategies for infectious related diseases.
    • Microbiome based therapeutic delivery.
    • Genetically engineered phages delivering therapeutic cargo (skin, gut, oral).
  • Immunology of infectious disease vaccines:
    • Antigen delivery strategies to elicit mucosal immune response.
    • Exploring existing human clinical or epi cohorts for vaccinology research.
    • Innovative approaches to support exploratory immunology (technology coming from neuroscience field, oncology, vision biology, live imaging solutions, etc).
    • Innovative immunological assays (low volume, mucosal immunology, rapid, vaccine efficacy assessment, using supportive artificial intelligence tools).
  • Strategies targeting innate immune system and innate memory/trained immunity.
  • Antigen design – new methods for antigen discovery, optimization and characterization, supportive artificial intelligence tools:
    • Rationale versus precision antigen design.
    • Native versus de novo antigen design.
    • Impact on glycosylation on antigen design for bacterial and viral targets.
    • New in silico tools for vaccine candidate selection and optimal antigen design/prediction value.
    • Build on “Smart RNA vaccines” with highly regulated & cell-specific expression.

Call timelines:

April 22: Call for Pre-proposals submission by Institutions
May 31: Submit your completed Pre-Proposal to [email protected] for review.
June 3: Submission of completed Pre-Proposals to Sanofi by Institutions. 
July 11: Notification Pre-proposals chosen to be pursued - Call for Full Proposals
Sept 2: Submission of Full Proposals to Sanofi by Institutions
Oct. 22: Institutions informed funding decisions

Related Documents:

2024-2025_iawards_na_-_call_for_pre-proposals_pdf.docx

2024-2025_na_iawards_pre-proposal_template_final.docx