George D. Yancopoulos

Dr. George D. Yancopoulos is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron Laboratories. Yancopoulos graduated as valedictorian of both the Bronx High School of Science and Columbia College, and then earned his MD & PhD degrees at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Yancopoulos left academia in 1989 to become scientific founder of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Yancopoulos has not only built one of the world’s “top ten” biotech companies from the ground up (working together with his long-time friend and partner, Dr. Len Schleifer, who is CEO of Regeneron), but simultaneously been recognized as a world-class basic science researcher, while also inventing some of the most valuable technologies and FDA-approved drugs in the industry. Yancopoulos has authored more than 350 scientific manuscripts, and, according to a study by the Institute for Scientific Information, was the eleventh most highly cited scientist in the world during the 1990′s. Yanocopoulous has contributed to basic science by elucidating and biologically characterizing several families of cytokine and tyrosine kinase receptors and their ligands, and demonstrated their roles in regulating neural, muscular, and vascular development. He also developed the technique of epitope tagging to define receptor complex composition and provided unifying concepts for the understanding of receptor mediated signaling. 

 Working with his team at Regeneron, Yancopoulos holds almost 100 patents, including for Regeneron’s foundational platforms for target and drug discovery such as Trap Technology, VelociGene® (which was utilized by the NIH for its $50M “Knock-Out the Mouse Genome Project”) and VelocImmuneTM (which is arguably one of the most valuable biotechnologies ever invented, having already generated more than $2.5B in licensing and collaboration revenues). Yancopoulos is also a principal inventor and developer of Regeneron’s three FDA-approved drugs, including EYLEA® (VEGF Trap-Eye, a new treatment for age-related macular degeneration), ZALTRAP® (VEGF Trap-Onc, for colorectal cancer), and ARCALYST® (the IL1-Trap, for orphan inflammatory disease).  EYLEA® has already achieved blockbuster status, with one of the largest first-full year launches in biotech history. Yancopoulos’ team has recently progressed several fully human monoclonal antibodies (derived using his VelocImmuneTMplatform) into advanced human trials for various indications, including cholesterol-lowering, rheumatoid arthritis, allergic asthma and atopic dermatitis. Yacoupoulous' articles appear in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and Science.