Regeneron: VEGF Traps, Trump's COVID Antibody Cocktail and an Amgen Verdict

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Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1988 in Tarrytown, New York, by Leonard Schleifer, a former Weill Cornell professor of medicine, and George Yancopoulos, an MD and PhD student from Columbia; both came from Queens. The name comes from its first goal, regenerating neurons with neurotrophic factors. When that work produced no marketable therapies, the company turned to cytokine receptors and tyrosine kinase receptors and built a VEGF trap, a decoy that captures the protein driving abnormal blood vessel growth in age-related macular degeneration. Yancopoulos holds more than 1,000 patents and has worked on every drug the company makes, which grew almost entirely from internal research rather than acquisitions. By 2025 Regeneron reported $14.3 billion in revenue, $4.5 billion in net income and more than 15,000 employees, selling Eylea at about $11,000 a year per eye, Dupixent for severe eczema at about $37,000 a year and the cholesterol drug Praluent.

In July 2020, under Operation Warp Speed, Regeneron won a $450 million contract from BARDA and the Department of Defense to manufacture its antibody cocktail REGN-COV2. The New York Times criticized the deal because taxpayers covered 80 percent of costs while the company kept the intellectual property and pricing. That October, President Donald Trump received the unapproved drug at Walter Reed through compassionate use and then called it a cure; Regeneron filed for emergency use authorization the same day with 50,000 doses ready, and the FDA granted it in November 2020. The speed came from platforms built over a decade: trap fusion proteins stabilized with part of a human IgG antibody, and the VelociSuite tools, including VelocImmune, that rapidly generate fully human monoclonal antibodies.

• A 2015 immuno-oncology collaboration brought more than $2 billion from Sanofi, and in May 2020 Regeneron bought back about $5 billion of its own shares held by Sanofi.
• Regeneron was ranked the seventh-best publicly listed company of the 2010s, with a total return of 1,457 percent.
• The Regeneron Genetics Center has sequenced more than 3 million human exomes and pairs them with de-identified health records to find protective mutations.
• In May 2025 a federal court in Delaware awarded Regeneron $135.6 million in compensatory and $271.2 million in punitive damages against Amgen in an antitrust case over the PCSK9 drugs Praluent and Repatha.
• Schleifer and Yancopoulos reportedly hold more than $2 billion in combined company stock.