Cuomo and patients celebrate Regeneron’s success with employees
Employees at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. heard moving testimony from patients on the life-changing effects of new drugs developed in Regeneron labs on a day that celebrated both the opening of two buildings in a $150 million expansion and the Queens Connection at the biotech company”™s headquarters on the Landmark at Eastview campus.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo ”” sheltered from rain and wind at the Nov. 12 ceremony under a tent that stretched about the length of a football field in a courtyard outside Regeneron”™s new four-story buildings housing about 600 employees in 297,000 square feet of office and laboratory space ”” had his audience laughing as he traced the Queens roots of the day”™s political speakers and Regeneron”™s co-founders.
- Dr. Leonard Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., and Gov. Andrew Cuomo share a laugh at a Thursday ceremony marking the opening of Regeneron”™s two new buildings on the Landmark at Eastview campus in Mount Pleasant.
Dr. Leonard S. Schleifer, CEO of Regeneron, and Dr. George D. Yancopoulos, the company”™s chief scientific officer and president of Regeneron Laboratories, are both products of Queens, as is Cuomo and U.S. Rep. Nita Lowey, the 14-term congresswoman who spoke at the grand-opening event and former neighbor in Hollis of the Cuomo family. The governor amusingly recalled her criticism of the teenaged Andrew”™s “grease-monkey” penchant for loud American muscle cars.
His Queens-bred father, the late Mario Cuomo, was governor when Schleifer and Yancopoulos more than a quarter-century ago sought state funds to assist their start-up company. The elder Cuomo in 1988 approved $250,000 in innovation financing for Regeneron, and the company the next year leased about 10,000 square feet of space at the Landmark at Eastview.
Today Regeneron occupies more than 1.1 million square feet and employs about 2,200 workers, from a total global workforce of about 4,000 employees, on the life sciences campus in the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant. Regeneron has about 1,100 employees at its upstate manufacturing facility in Rensselaer.
“He invested in Regeneron because he believed in Queens, basically,” Cuomo said of his father.
“My father would be so proud to be here today,” he said. Regeneron”™s co-founders “dared to dream and dared to follow their dream even though it was a very long road.”
Cuomo cited the achievements of his administration”™s “entrepreneurial government” in making the state more business friendly and closing the “commercialization gap” between academic research and discovery of new drug therapies and their development for the commercial market.
Entrepreneurial government, said Cuomo, is “government working hand in glove with private-sector companies to grow jobs and grow the economy.”
Key to that effort are the 10 regional economic development councils of public-sector and business leaders appointed by the governor. Cuomo drew upon those Queens connections and tapped Regeneron”™s Schleifer to serve as co-chairman of the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council.
“Once you”™re in with the Cuomos, it”™s hard to get out,” Schleifer bantered at the ceremony, calling his co-chairman”™s post on the governor”™s regional council “a life sentence.”
“So here I am, saying nice things about the governor,” he said.
Stacey Lane, a director of the Familial Hypercholesterolemia Foundation, and Austin Jacobson, a Bedford attorney, described years of suffering with rare diseases that finally were relieved or cured by Regeneron”™s drug products.
Lane was diagnosed as a child with familial hypercholesterolemia, an inherited disorder that often leads to early cardiovascular disease from high levels of LDL or “bad” cholesterol. She was 6 when her father, a thin, athletic nonsmoker, died at 36 of heart disease.
Years of participation in clinical trials and studies and multiple-drug regimens failed to lower her dangerously high LDL levels, and Lane said she spent “my entire adult life” waiting for her first heart attack. Two of her three children have inherited the disease.
Since using Praluent, an injectable antibody drug developed by Regeneron, “My cholesterol has been lowered to levels I would never have thought possible,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I have the hope of growing old with my husband, seeing my children as adults and seeing my grandchildren,” she said,
Jacobson said the pain, grotesque physical appearance, and severe chronic itching caused by atopic dermatitis made him suicidal. “Everything about life just hurts,” he said.
The skin condition is like “poison ivy that doesn”™t go away, that”™s covered from head to toe with no chance of a cure ”¦ When you”™re like me, scratching is the equivalent of breathing. I don”™t have a choice.”
“Horror movies were coming to me to star in it,” Jacobson said of the disease”™s effect on his appearance.
Told by his physician about dupilumab, a Regeneron drug therapy for inflammatory disorders that is in late-stage clinical trials, “I was as resistant as resistant can be,” Jacobson said. But the attorney decided to try the not yet marketed treatment.
“Within two hours of getting the drug, I knew I was on the pathway to a cure,” he said. “Within a month after taking this drug, I went from 100 percent covered to 100 percent cured.”
Jacobson thanked Regeneron employees. “You, without knowing it, saved my life,” he said. “You saved my life because you gave me hope. You gave me the ability to look like who I am ”” a human being, not a monster.”
“I have never once thought about suicide again,” he said. “I”™m happy with my life because you guys gave it back to me.”