Inside One Company’s Quest to Develop a COVID-19 Antibody Treatment: A Q&A with Regeneron’s George Yancopoulos

While teams race to develop a vaccine, Regeneron’s treatment would use antibodies to give patients short-term immunity.

By Dan Hurley
Apr 8, 2020 3:00 PMNov 3, 2020 5:05 PM
Coronavirus on a dark blue background with purple effect
(Credit: Andrii Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock)

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When I read back in mid-March that the biotech firm Regeneron had isolated “hundreds of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” I thought it sounded crazy. Antibodies, after all, are the immune system’s hound dogs, trained to recognize and attack any viral or microbial invader.

Even though the roughly 30-year-old company has previously developed a three-antibody drug to treat Ebola, I couldn’t understand how so many potential treatments could be isolated in a matter of weeks by a single entity. So I hopped on the phone March 23 with George Yancopoulos, the company’s co-founder, president and chief scientific officer. He spoke from his car, and I hoped he was driving slower than he talked. This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity.

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