The year was 1994 when a major phase 3 setback in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis pushed six-year-old biotech Regeneron to the brink. Facing an existential crisis, the company’s two founders realized a leader with a business acumen was desperately needed at the helm. Enter Roy Vagelos, M.D., the former chair and CEO of Merck & Co.
Now, after a long and fruitful 29-year run, Vagelos, 93, is retiring as Regeneron’s chairman.
In a rare arrangement, Regeneron said its board will name the two company co-founders, CEO Len Schleifer, M.D., Ph.D., and president and chief scientific officer George Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., as co-chairs after its annual meeting in June.
The retirement of Vagelos marks the end of an era at Regeneron. While Schleifer and Yancopoulos founded the corporation, it was Vagelos who molded Regeneron into the company we know today—a Big Biotech firm based on industry-leading discovery platforms and the developer of several megablockbuster drugs.
Reflecting on his time at the company, Vagelos said in a statement that he “watched with pride as Regeneron has been transformed from a small biotechnology company with big ideas into a successful research-based biopharmaceutical company that improves the lives of many patients.”
Vagelos retired from Merck back in 1994. Under his leadership, Merck’s revenue climbed from $3.6 billion in 1985 to $15 billion in 1994.
Merely months later, Vagelos reemerged as Regeneron’s chairman in January 1995. Regeneron at that time just suffered a blow for its lead neurotrophic factor candidate in ALS. Restructuring and layoffs followed, and Regeneron’s overall direction was put into question. Vagelos was brought on at the critical moment to oversee the company’s strategy.
Vagelos expanded Regeneron’s horizon from central nervous system diseases. The outgoing chairman encouraged Regeneron to “focus our research on disease settings where the biological profile can be fully characterized and the clinical benefit evaluated more quickly,” the company says on its website.
With its commercialization timeline pushed back, Regeneron made itself a platform company, maintaining a revenue flow by offering its drug discovery capabilities to partners while advancing its own pipeline.
In 2008, 20 years after its founding, Regeneron introduced its first commercial product, Arcalyst for the treatment of Cryopyrin-Associated Periodic Syndromes, a rare inflammatory disorder. But a key breakthrough came in 2011 with the FDA approval for VEGF inhibitor Eylea. The eye drug generated $6.3 billion in U.S. sales for Regeneron last year and 3.2 billion euros ($3.5 billion) for its international partner Bayer.
Both Arcalyst and Eylea are based on Regeneron’s Trap technology. Trap and Regeneron’s antibody drug platform VelociSuite gave birth to multiple popular drugs, including Sanofi’s top-selling product, IL-4/13 inhibitor Dupixent. In 2022, Regeneron recorded nearly $5 billion in revenues from collaborations alone.
Vagelos “provided invaluable guidance as we have built Regeneron into what it is today, and he continues to inspire us as we work to turn world-class science into medicines that improve the lives of people around the globe,” Schleifer said in a statement Monday.
With nearly 12,000 employees worldwide and total revenue of $12.2 billion in 2022, Regeneron has grown into a major biopharma company.
Regeneron faces new challenges today, including seemingly fierce competition against Eylea and a short-lived COVID-19-related revenue bump. Some of the novel projects that Regeneron is working on include bispecific antibodies—based on VelociSuite—and RNA interference therapies in collaboration with Alnylam.