Leonard S. Schleifer was an assistant professor at Cornell University Medical College when in 1988 he decided he could do more good by developing drugs for large patient populations rather than treating one patient at a time as a physician.
“I wanted to pursue the model of trying to make a difference on a larger scale,” the founding president and CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Greenburgh told an audience at Manhattanville College recently.
He professed to be a nervous novice in the public conversational format that marked the debut on the Purchase campus of the Leadership Conversations Series, a planned series of talks with the region”™s business leaders sponsored by First Niagara Bank and hosted by The Business Council of Westchester. Marsha Gordon, president and CEO of The Business Council and Schleifer”™s colleague on the state Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council, led the opening conversation.
Schleifer recalled that his mentor in biochemical pharmacology, a future Nobel Prize winner, tried to talk him out of his plan to leave the medical school laboratory to form a biopharmaceutical company. Instead he became one of Regeneron”™s two other co-founders. “I was not to be dissuaded,” Schleifer said.
Regeneron set up its “world headquarters” in a leaky Manhattan apartment before moving to Westchester County and startup space at New York Medical College in 1989. Today the approximately 2,300-employee company is headquartered as anchor tenant at Biomed Realty Trust”™s Landmark at Eastview life sciences campus in the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant.  Two buildings are under construction there in an approximately $100 million expansion by Regeneron that will add 300,000 square feet of office and laboratory space ”“ increasing the company”™s current space by more than 40 percent ”“ and will create about 400 full-time jobs.
Nearly 25 years after his career-altering decision, Schleifer”™s determined pursuit of science and enterprise at Regeneron yielded its first commercial successes with drug treatments for patients with macular degeneration, terminal colorectal cancer and rare inflammatory disorders.
Regeneron was NASDAQ”™s top-performing stock in 2012, and its employee stock option program ”“ an incentive to innovation, Schleifer said ”“ has made millionaires of several hundred company employees.
The company”™s total revenues amounted to $626 million in the first quarter this year, a 42 percent increase from the first quarter of 2013. The company”™s first quarter net income, excluding income tax expenses, increased 31 percent from a year ago to $263 million, or $2.26 per diluted share.
Worldwide net sales of EYLEA, Regeneron”™s injectable drug for patients with severe loss of vision, amounted to $577 million in this year”™s first quarter, a 54 percent increase from the first quarter of 2013. In the U.S. alone, the company has forecast net sales this year of $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion for its EYLEA product.
“People like to think of us as an overnight success,” Schleifer said. “It”™s 25 years of overnight.”
The CEO stressed that science from the start has driven the company”™s evolution in drug development and eventual market success. “We live and breathe the fact that science drives our business, and we are passionate about science,” he said.
“In some businesses you can talk your way to a result,” he said. “But in our business, at the end of the day there”™s an arbiter” in the form of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the physicians who treat patients with Regeneron drugs.
“Our mission is patients and the only tool we have to help patients is science ”“ and the rest will follow,” Schleifer said. Rather than focus on any one disease for which to develop drug treatments, “We follow the science ”“ that”™s our strategy.” He said Regeneron currently has 15 to 17 drugs in various stages of clinical testing.
Regeneron since 2008 has received several awards for its workplace environment, innovations and rapid growth. Schleifer and the company”™s founding scientist and chief scientific officer, Dr. George Yancopoulos, received the Scrip Intelligence award for management team of the year in 2013. Schleifer said the company is proudest of its ranking in both 2012 and 2013 as the top biopharmaceutical employer worldwide by Science magazine.
The fast-growing company since 2007 has more than tripled its workforce in Westchester and at its manufacturing facility in upstate Rensselaer. It expects to continue to expand to 4,000 to 5,000 employees, the CEO said. As it achieves that scale, will Regeneron be able to maintain its company culture? “That probably is the biggest single challenge” for the company, Schleifer said.
Schleifer was asked what advice he would give other entrepreneurs starting a business.
First, “Choose your partners well,” he said.
Second, “You have to build a team. It cannot be done as a one-man band. It can be, but it”™s extremely difficult.”
Finally, “Be prepared to deal with failure.”
Schleifer noted Regeneron”™s string of failures, including its original goal to regenerate neurons for the treatment of Lou Gehrig”™s disease, a founding effort that inspired the company”™s name. In the drug development industry, “It”™s easier to fail than to succeed,” he said.
“As an entrepreneur, if you get knocked down, you better figure how you”™re going to get up the next morning and move forward stronger than you did the day before,” he said.
