Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was pumping through Walkmans everywhere, and biotech was about to have a moment. It was the 1980s, and Genentech had just gone public.
Widely regarded as the first modern biotech company, Genentech’s debut set the wheels in motion for Leonard Schleifer, M.D., Ph.D., then an assistant professor of neurology at Cornell University.
“What about starting a company to take on neurologic diseases?” Schleifer had asked his mentor, he recalled in a 2019 interview with the Cornell Chronicle.
“That’s a stupid idea. Get back in the lab and do something good,” was his mentor’s response, the now-CEO said.
Last year, New York-based Regeneron pulled in $14.3 billion in annual revenue, reflecting blockbuster collaborations with Sanofi and Bayer and a diverse portfolio of innovative medicines across oncology, rare disease and more. In 2021, Schleifer’s “stupid idea” made him the top-paid CEO in biopharma and healthcare. Today, Schleifer still helms the company as CEO, while his co-founder George Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., remains chief scientific officer.
A founder-led, multibillion-dollar pharma is a rarity in an industry dominated by centuries-old global companies. For Regeneron, its physician-scientist-led roots bleed into every part of its ongoing affairs.
In a new series, Fierce Pharma Marketing will interview Big Pharma marketing and communications leaders about how their companies are evolving their marketing cultures, defining what they stand for in 2026 and rethinking the industry’s reputation, public understanding and corporate role.
In our latest interview in the series, we talk with Christina Chan, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Regeneron.
‘Science-driven’ decisions
“We’re still unique in the industry room,” Chan told Fierce Pharma Marketing. “There are not many like us.”
As Chan sees it, her team’s role at the company is to help the public understand the “science, innovation and people” behind the work that Regeneron’s scientists do every day. This involves making topics that are “very complex scientifically” more accessible. Despite the complexity of Regeneron’s work, Chan maintains that the public and Regeneron’s audiences “don’t need less science.”
“It’s more about different entry points,” she explained.
One audio-focused entry point Regeneron has been exploring recently is its latest podcast series, “Science Illuminated.” The project transforms scientific imagery taken in Regeneron’s labs into a video-and-audio podcast format through a meditative series narrated by the company’s own staff engineer Michelle Mazzeo.
The concept allows Regeneron to distill its complex scientific topics into an immersive, calming experience and lets it “enter the conversation a little bit differently,” Chan said.
“We’ve always been science driven,” she explained. “It very much influences the way we make decisions.”
That carries through to the communications department as Chan and her team pair scientific insights with “new digital avenues” and media such as podcasting, resulting in something “deeply creative but also scientifically rigorous, and meets people where they’re consuming content.”
That, Chan said, is the “sweet spot” for Regeneron’s scientific storytelling.
Aside from “Science Illuminated,” Regeneron runs a host of unique online science messaging platforms, such as “Tech Trailblazers,” an educational series that features Regeneron scientists explaining their work alongside a young child who acts as a “scientific simplifier,” repeating the information in more casual, relatable language. The children featured in the videos are those of other Regeneron colleagues, bringing an all-in-the-family atmosphere to the labs.
The idea behind “Tech Trailblazers” stems from a common mantra of Yancopoulos, who often says “if you can’t describe it to a fifth grade, then you don’t really know it well enough,” according to Chan. “We took that to heart,” she said.
The series “humanizes” the science and comes from a social-forward, digitally conscious perspective. “Science Illuminated” takes a similar approach, meeting people in “different places of the storytelling.”
This, she said, is “where trust is built,” allowing people to understand the science as opposed to being put off by its complexity.
“That’s a big piece of our corporate responsibility,” she said. “How we approach the work, not just the work itself.”
Building trust through science
In 2026’s evolving digital landscape, marred by a pessimistic younger generation and politicized pharmaceutical topics, biopharma companies are making some inroads in rebuilding trust with a public that has long held a general distaste for the industry. Regeneron’s approach is to lean on science and make complex concepts easier for people to understand as a way to build that trust.
Within scientific discovery, “people can only understand the impact of that if they really understand what's underlying it,” Chan said. “That’s what we're always trying to translate, even from the Regeneron corporate brand perspective, to make that connection, to create that understanding.”
However, when it comes to establishing and maintaining trust, “it’s not just about what you say,” Chan said. “It’s what you do.”
One example of a Regeneron action that speaks volumes is its rare decision to offer its groundbreaking genetic hearing loss gene therapy Otarmeni at no cost in the U.S.
Approved in April under the FDA Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program, Otarmeni made history as the first gene therapy for hearing loss related to variants in the OTOF gene.
The scientific achievement also marked a milestone for Regeneron and its emerging genetic medicines business as the company’s first approved gene therapy. What was once known as an "antibody company or biologics company" has been "building out our expertise across genetic medicine modalities" for the last eight years, Jonathon Whitton, Ph.D., of Regeneron’s genetic medicines program, told Fierce Biotech ahead of Otarmeni’s approval.
Gene therapies represent a major breakthrough in innovative science, but with the exorbitant cost of developing personalized treatments, they typically hit the market with a multimillion-dollar price tag. Along with Regeneron's Most Favored Nation drug pricing agreement, under which it pledged to lower the cost of its drugs on Medicaid and align the costs of its future therapies with prices "set in that defined group of other countries," the company opted to provide Otarmeni at no cost to clinically eligible individuals in the U.S.
“Otarmeni is a huge scientific leap and is representative of Regeneron’s approaches to continually push the boundaries of science to benefit humanity,” Yancopoulos said in a company release at the time. “We are honored to be in the position to be the first company to ever offer such a gene therapy advance for free to those in the U.S. and serves to highlight our belief that the biopharmaceutical industry can be a genuine force for good in the world.”
Giving out a gene therapy for free is “not a choice you can make financially if you’re not in a place like we are,” Chan acknowledged, pointing to products that have been “incredibly commercially successful over time.”
Through its nearly 40-year history, Regeneron has made a name for itself through blockbuster, wide-reaching products such as Bayer-partnered eye injection Eylea and inflammatory disease med Dupixent, a collaboration with Sanofi. As for the rest of the company’s drug portfolio, it doesn’t specifically chase drug areas that it thinks will have “huge commercial opportunity.”
Instead, “we follow the science,” Chan said, “and we mean that.”
Despite a market cap that puts it on par with many industry heavyweights, Regeneron considers itself something of a “scrappy start-up.” It’s a mindset that was ingrained in the company since its early biotech beginnings, but now, “we have more experience, we have more resources,” Chan said.
Outside of meeting its audience in “different places, in which they would have entry into getting to know us,” Chan emphasizes taking advantage of opportunities to do so.
“Things happen when you’re nimble,” she said, “when you’re already ready to help those new people who are just being introduced to you, to know who you are and to already have that ability to see who you are and how you operate.”
And how is it that the company operates?
“Doing well by doing good,” Chan said, a quote that comes from Schleifer’s father and now anchors Regeneron’s core values.