The director general of the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM), Christelle Ratignier-Carbonneil, will leave her position, the government announced Tuesday, May 21, without the name of her designated successor being immediately known.
“Ms. Christelle Ratignier-Carbonneil is appointed director general of the Grand-Est regional health agency, effective June 15,” it is written in the minutes of Tuesday’s council of ministers.
The general director of the agency, which manages medicines policy in France, has held her position since 2020, after several years as number two. In a press release from the ANSM, Ms. Ratignier-Carbonneil, who had been renewed in her position at the end of 2023, wrote that her departure to the ARS Grand-Est would allow her to be “closer to the citizens” and the territories, “essential keystones to the implementation of health policies”.
Immediately, the executive did not say who it was proposing as successor, a choice which must then be ratified by parliamentarians from the social affairs committees of the National Assembly and the Senate. The ANSM specified that it should be Alexandre de la Volpilière, one of the agency’s two deputy directors general, who would take over in the interim.
Christelle Ratignier-Carbonneil’s mandate, which began in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, was notably marked by controversies surrounding the clinical trials carried out at the IHU in Marseille under the direction of Didier Raoult. The ANSM has taken several restrictive measures against the IHU in recent years and taken legal action, but some observers have accused it of being slow to act.
The post-Covid years have also confronted the agency with recurring difficulties in supplying medicines, a subject on which it has notably attempted to better coordinate pharmacists and the pharmaceutical industry.
