Regeneron will start testing its Covid-19 treatment in June
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Good morning.
The United States may have a broken political system, a dysfunctional health care delivery system, and an excess of entitled people who don’t know when to stay off the beaches or out of the bars. But we do have one big thing going for us: the smartest and most creative entrepreneurs on the face of the earth.
One of them is George Yancopoulos, who 30 years ago helped found Regeneron, and continues today as its chief scientist. He is working the front lines in the war against Covid-19, and getting tantalizingly close to a cure. I had the opportunity to talk with him late last week, and left the conversation feeling far more optimistic about the course of this deadly disease. You can listen to the interview here.
Yancopoulos described a three-front battle against Covid-19. The first front are efforts to apply existing drugs to treat the disease–including a Regeneron rheumatoid arthritis drug that went into clinical trials against Covid-19 last week. The second is the search for a vaccine, which will likely take “a year or two,” because of the need for careful testing for safety.
The third approach is to develop a new treatment targeted directly at the disease. At Regeneron, that involves using a technique Yancopoulos developed and used to treat Ebola. The scientists implant human genes in mice, then infect those mice with the coronavirus, and then harvest, “clone” and purify the antibodies that result. While a vaccine provokes the body to create its own antibodies, Yancopoulos’ treatment would inject antibodies directly into the patient. The protection won’t last as long as that coming from a vaccine, but it could be extremely important in protecting frontline health care workers and high-risk individuals.
“We’ll begin testing in June,” he says. “We have the capacity to make hundreds of thousands of doses a month, and we could increase that tenfold.”
When I noted that Regeneron’s stock price has been heading north since the first of February, in part because of this work, Yancopoulos responded: “We don’t watch the stock. We pay attention to delivering important medicines to people. We are not a commercially driven company.”
“Really?” I challenged. “You aren’t focused on your bottom line?”
“If you deliver important drugs to people, the money takes care of itself,” he said. “Innovation has saved us before. That’s what we have to focus on again.”
And by the way, if you listen to the podcast, you will notice it says at the end that it was recorded at Fortune Media offices in New York. That’s no longer true. I safely recorded the Yancopoulos interview over a phone line at my home in Greenwich, Conn. (a town that was practicing social distancing long before it became a thing!).
News below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com