In the lab at Regeneron. Courtesy Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Inside Regeneron as Covid exploded BY PETER KATZ
W
hile the Covid-19 virus was knocking the world off balance, scientists, production experts, office managers, logistics personnel and others at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Tarrytown were gearing up in a monumental effort to find a therapy that could save lives. Regeneron had the financial as well as human resources needed for such an effort, having reported more than $6.55 billion in revenues and more than $2.11 billion in net income to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for 2019. What resulted from Regeneron's effort — the drug REGEN-COV, also called as the Regeneron cocktail — combines two monoclonal antibodies to attack SARS-CoV-2, as Covid-19 is
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formally known. It's one of the drugs that Donald J. Trump received while he was president, which some experts believe may have helped save his life after he became ill and had to be helicoptered to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. REGEN-COV has been demonstrated to prevent the hospitalization and death of Covid-19 patients. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave it Emergency Use Authorization, subsequently modifying that to allow for the drug to be injected as well as infused. The FDA also allowed cutting the required dose in half to 1,200 milligrams, because it works so well. This is not the first time Regeneron has responded successfully to a virus crisis. It created the drug Inmazeb to treat the deadly Ebola virus. Inmazeb is a mixture of three monoclo-
nal antibodies that were created using Regeneron's technique of engineering the immune systems of mice to simulate the human immune system and generate human-like antibodies to fight invading diseases. Inmazeb targets a glycoprotein on the surface of Ebola and blocks the virus from attaching to human cells, a necessary step for the virus to get inside and kill the human cells. Clinical trials, including use during Ebola outbreaks in Guinea in 2014 through 2016 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018 and 2019, showed that the therapy worked, leading the FDA to designate the drug as a Breakthrough Therapy that would ultimately become the first FDA-approved treatment for Zaire Ebola virus in pediatric and adult patients. The immediate thought echoing through the more than one million square feet of space at Regeneron's main campus was, if the principle works against Ebola, wouldn't it also work against Covid-19? “We did a bit of work on MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome a coronavirus that was first reported in Saudi Arabia in 2012) so there was experience with coronavirus research,” Alina Baum, associate director for infectious diseases at Regeneron, tells WAG. “We started hearing these stories coming out of China — it was maybe late December — of just some kind of new respiratory virus. In the beginning of January, our government partners shared the sequence . . .of the spike protein.” Spike proteins are on the surface of the Covid-19 virus and, like the proteins on the surface of Ebola, provide a mechanism for the virus to latch onto human cells and proceed to invade. “Because we have this history of working on emerging infections with MERS, Ebola, Zika (a virus transmitted by mosquitoes) there was really no discussion of whether we should do this or not,” Baum says. “It was almost a no-brainer for us. There's a new virus and we had the sequence, which is the key to begin the actual work. We were going to start working on it.” Baum recalls that what happened from Jan. 13, 2020, when Regeneron got the genetic sequence, to the end of that month was that the urgency increased almost exponentially. “It went from 'we might as well work on this and get some antibodies' to 'oh my God, this is going to be a really big problem. It's going to be a global problem. We need to move as fast as humanly possible to isolate antibodies and try to move into the clinical development,'” Baum recalls. “We had the capability, and we had this commitment to addressing emerging infections.” Baum says people involved in infectious dis-
