George Yancopoulos

When Leonard Schleifer recruited George Yancopoulos as CSO of Regeneron in 1988, Schleifer was running the company out of a one-bedroom apartment in New York City. Thirty years on, the company has brought six drugs to the US market, and has a pipeline of more than fifteen antibody therapies in development across cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, inflammation, immunology, oncology and more. Yancopoulos credits this success to stable management, a commitment to in-house science, end-to-end drug discovery and development capabilities, and genetic approaches to target selection and validation. He told Asher Mullard about the company's evolving growth plans, and how its genetic ambitions led to the recent launch of an open and precompetitive collaboration to sequence the exomes of 500,000 people from the UK Biobank.