George Yancopoulos - April 15, 2020

George Yancopoulos, MD, PhD, Founding Scientist, President & Chief Scientific Officer, Regeneron, "Update on REGN efforts to address COVID19 pandemic"

Regeneron is leading two approaches that could have a major short-term impact until “active vaccines” arrive. The first approach is to use “re-purposed drugs”. There is anecdotal evidence that treating severe COVID-19 patients with anti-Il6R antibody (Actemra by Chugai-Roche) caused impressive improvement in a cohort of 21 individuals. Regeneron has the only other FDA-approved anti-IL6R antibody (Kevzara, by Regeneron-Sanofi). For this drug, Regeneron is adopting anadaptive Phase 2/3 clinical trial design, with the Phase 2 data expected by the end of April. Phase 3 patients are being enrolled in parallel without a hypothesis/endpoint. Once the Phase 2 data is in, Regeneron will work with the FDA to take the necessary steps for Phase 3 and they will be able to act quickly since the patients are already enrolled. The second approach is to generate a targeted antiviral antibody cocktail. This method takes advantage of decades of technology development that involves both a genetically-humanized “VelocImmune” mouse capable of making fully human antibodies and isolating antibodies from “convalescent humans”. They are using a high throughout approach and were able to isolate human monoclonal antibodies in 33 days. They are looking at the neutralization potency of a two mAb combination across known spike protein variants, and are hoping that the antibody cocktail can be used for prophalxis and/or treatment of COVID-19.