Drugs are at the heart of a triple alliance: health, society, and business. Research is the condition and the driver of development, whose end purpose is to promote life and repel disease. The approaches and issues that preside over the balances in corporations that design drugs evolve and are often complex. They raise questions that reach beyond technology and expert knowledge. As the third pharmaceutical player worldwide and the first in Europe, sanofi-aventis takes this as a challenge that involves society, research, and market access. While developments in biomedicine offer new therapeutic hopes, they also engender new economic and public health debates.

The ESSEC sanofi-aventis Chair offers a space for dialogue and training to structure these debates, cool passions, and help the debates serve economic and social progress. The future managers of the pharmaceutical industry, with their diverse training backgrounds and geographic origins, should find the tools needed to decipher, interpret and act in a world that is ours for the making. So it is with a radically forward-thinking approach and a break with conventional knowledge that the know-how and reputation of ESSEC and sanofi-aventis join forces. By creating this Chair, our main goal is to actively participate in society's debate over innovation and progress as regards of health, bringing human values back to the core of technological and economic issues.