A Regeneron Profile

In the spirit of this article about Regeneron, here's a profile in Forbes of the company's George Yancopoulos and Leonard Schleifer. There are several interesting things in there, such as these lessons from Roy Vagelos (when he became Regeneron's chairman after retiring from Merck): Lesson one: Stop betting on drugs when you won’t have any clues they work until you finish clinical trials. (That ruled out expanding into neuroscience–and is one of the main reasons other companies are abandoning ailments like Alzheimer’s.) Lesson two: Stop focusing only on the early stages of drug discovery and ignoring the later stages of human testing. It’s not enough to get it perfect in a petri dish. Regeneron became focused on mitigating the two reasons that drugs fail: Either the biology of the targeted disease is not understood or the drug does something that isn’t expected and causes side effects. They're not the only ones thinking this way, of course, but if you're not, you're likely to run into big (and expensive) trouble.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Drug Development Source Type: blogs