NEW YORK – Dr. George Yancopoulos, President and Chief scientific officer of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, is the Grand Marshal for the Greek Independence Parade on March 26 in New York. One of the leading scientists and the head of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Dr. Yancopoulos, spoke with The National Herald about his life and work and the full circle moment of being selected as Grand Marshal. His achievements have honored and continue to honor the Greek community.
The American-born Yancopoulos grew up in Woodside. He was class valedictorian at both the Bronx High School of Science and Columbia University, and earned MD and PhD degrees in 1987 from Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons. Yancopoulos worked in the field of molecular immunology at Columbia with Dr. Fred Alt and received the Lucille P. Markey Scholar Award for his efforts. In 1989, he left his academic career and became the founding scientist for Regeneron with Leonard Schleifer (to whom he refers as “Len” throughout the interview). Among his honors, Yancopoulos was awarded Columbia’s Stevens Triennial Prize for Research and its University Medal of Excellence for Distinguished Achievement. In 2004, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His father was not, however, very enthusiastic about his choice to become a scientist, as he explained to TNH.
GY: My father was very unhappy because he knew scientists didn’t make very much money and he wanted me to become a conventional doctor. Back then being a doctor was a great job and you could make money…The family had been destroyed by two wars in Greece and so we were pretty poor, he never finished his education because he went into the army, so he wanted his son to succeed and it was all about education. So he pushed education and he pushed education so much, he didn’t realize you push, and then you want to become an academic, you want to become a scientist, and a couple of days later he comes to me, he had cut out an article from the Ethnikos Kyrix, the Greek newspaper because he only read the Greek newspaper, about Roy Vagelos leaving academia to go become head of research at Merck.
My father said to me, so if you want to become a scientist, don’t become any scientist, at least become like this scientist, become like Roy Vagelos and Roy was a big hero in the Greek community and still is. You may not know this, but he really built Merck to what it became, Merck was the most admired company for ten years in a row and he was the most admired CEO in the world for ten years in a row, and this was all documented in the Greek paper, and my father kept cutting out the articles. He cut them all out and said “this is the guy you want to be like.”
Roy wasn’t only my hero, he was everybody’s hero, so even when we started the company, my partner, Len, he also of course, we all wanted to be like Roy, and we all thought Roy was the greatest.
In the early days of Regeneron, when we were very small and there were only ten people and so forth, my dad knew Len very well and he was always coming over, there was a much different environment if you can imagine because we were a small operation and my father would come by and he would give us a hard time all the time and he would say to us “you guys don’t know what you’re doing, what you should do is call up this guy Roy Vagelos and he’ll want to help a young Greek guy like George.” So my dad was saying that all the time and Len would get annoyed, he wouldn’t get really annoyed, but he would joke around and I still remember, he would say “Mr. Yancopoulos, you’re going to have to stop, otherwise I’m going to have to call security and have you removed from the premises”; he was joking. So anyway, a few years go by and I’ll never forget it, I was sitting in Len’s office so we had some calamity, and luckily for me I had Len so I never worried about things, and he’s not panicking but he’s very concerned, [and says] “you know George, maybe we’re not quite as smart as we think we are and maybe we’re not quite ready to be the next Roy Vagelos neither of us together, maybe we should call up the real Roy Vagelos and see whether he might come and help us out, figure it out for us.”[I said ] you’re sounding like my dad and sure enough right then and there, he called, this was in the early to mid-90s and you had to call information. I remember him calling, finding out what the area code for Raleigh, NJ which is where Merck headquarters were and he dialed and asked for the chairman’s office at Merck Pharmaceuticals and you know Roy didn’t pick up but he left a message and I said Len, you know we’re never going to hear back and sure enough a week later he comes to me and says “George, Roy called back,” and anyway, the rest is history.
So my dad made Roy my hero from the age of 15 and I am still trying to, though there is no way you can catch up to Roy, he is just still the most amazing human being of all time. Roy is just the most incredible on so many levels, he may very well be… the best human being I know.”
TNH: You know, we are interviewing you to give our children and grandchildren another hero to follow. We congratulate you as the Grand Marshal of this year’s Greek Independence Parade, commemorating 196 years of freedom and to honor you as the person of the week for our Periodiko, dedicated to the leaders of the community. Your experience is inspiring. You’re here at Regeneron 28 years, you have arrived, and you have built an empire.
GY: Well, it’s amazing to me, but I was just a typical Greek kid from the Woodside-Astoria area and you know I was raised on the songs about [the Greek War of Independence], it’s so close the timing of Greeks in terms of their subjugation under the Turks, and my part of Greece wasn’t freed until the early 1900s, so all four of my grandparents were actually born under Turkish subjugation, some people call them slaves and the songs I was raised on were the songs of slavery or subjugation and I sang these songs, Feggaraki mou Lambro and Mavrin H Nyxta Sta Vouna. One song is about the children under Turkish rule and they’re not allowed to learn Greek and so forth, so at night lit by the moon they would go to secret schools in caves to learn and keep up the Greek because the Greeks were enslaved by the Turks for over 400 years and they maintained their Greekness, believe it or not, for that whole period of time, it’s one of the longest, maybe the longest periods when one group of people were enslaved and rose up and maintained their identity after all that period of time and how did they do it? By these secret schools and among other things. And the other song, Mavrin H Nyxta sta Vouna, which was my favorite. and I remember being on my bed when I was like four years old and making believe, so it’s about Greeks fighting the Turks and my town and my area is from the mountains where it was very real to me, where they were on the mountains fighting with the Turks with swords.
My town is called Kastoria. So it was all very real to me and all four of my grandparents had their stories about this and so it was with a lot of pride that you get dressed as a freedom fighter and you go to the parade when you’re a kid, and you have your sword and you’re playing with your friends. So, it is amazingly full circle 50 years later to be the Grand Marshall of this parade that I was marching in as a tsolia 50 plus years ago.
It’s sort of amazing but the history is so close, all four of my grandparents. And my grandfather, which is a phenomenal story he was a freedom fighter against the Turks and the Bulgarians in the late 1800s he was born in 1883 and he was sentenced to die and he escaped and he had no education so at the time, there was no education and somehow he got to Vienna, Austria. So think about this, he’s growing up in the late 1800s, he was born in 1883, so let’s say this is the late 1890s and he is in Vienna and sees electric lights for the first time because in Greece obviously, he had never seen it. He told me this story when I was a very little boy, he sees electric light and thought it was magic and was so fascinated by it that he decided he was going to devote his life to this magical miracle of these electric lights. He had no education, he had a job at the famous Vienna Opera House cleaning the floors, sweeping the floors and he would save the little librettos, the little books that would have the text in German and he taught himself how to read German, and he somehow, we still don’t know all the details, I have his diploma.
This is an amazing story by the way, so [back to] Roy Vagelos. So I want to be like Roy Vagelos, everyone wants to be like Roy Vagelos and there’s so many parallels I draw but you can’t make this stuff up. He got a bunch of Greeks including me and Michael Jaharis to donate to Columbia Medical Center to build this beautiful new building, the Vagelos Building, which is a spectacular building, anyway, and he gave the opening address at the building, the most incredible talk. He talked about his roots and where he came from, and one of the most amazing things that he said was that his parents were raised in war and they had nothing and they had to come over in the early 1900s as immigrants from the turmoil that was going on then, because they’re actually from around Constantinople and probably Smyrna and they somehow got displaced and they came over here but the previous generation, his grandfather, had been educated and about the only thing they brought with them was his grandfather’s diploma and the amazing thing is that my grandfather somehow got to university and became an electrical engineer in Austria and about the only thing that my family brought over when they came in the late 1950s from Greece was his diploma. I have his diploma on my wall and I have his name, you know Greeks name the first grandson after the grandfather, so his name is George Damis Damianos Yancopoulos and it’s the same name and I have a diploma from this university in Austria from the early 1900s with my name on it, and he became an electrical engineer, and he went back to Greece.
First, he went to Asia Minor and he built two of the first power plants in all of Greece in Smyrna which got destroyed in the Catastrophe of Smyrna, then he eventually moved around and he had a partnership with an Egyptian Jew and they built something like the first 15 power plants in all of Greece. Then, full circle, my father was born into a family that was actually quite wealthy, but then the Germans came and they took over all the power plants and somehow because he wasn’t willing to collaborate or whatever, they put my grandfather in jail and my father who was 15 at the time joined the army and became a freedom fighter. So, it basically came full circle. His father starts out with nothing, becomes very rich, builds an empire, has all these power plants, is left with nothing. My father now pretty much at the same age is now a freedom fighter and first against the Nazis and then against the Communists and so then he comes to America and raises me. So I tell my kids, they’ve got to be prepared there’s probably going to be a great collapse, they’re going to turn into freedom fighters and have to start from the beginning themselves because it’s all cyclical… you can’t make this up.
My mother, Vasiliki was also from Kastoria. She died last summer, at 91. I have a sister, Sophia, she was also pushed into a lot of education. She’s the smart one. She has a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from Columbia, and was actually in the same group with [famed astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium] Neil deGrasse Tyson. I went to high school with him, and my sister got her PhD with him.
TNH: Do your children also want to pursue careers in science?
GY: I have 4 kids, Ourania, Damis, Louka, and Demetra, ages 23, 21, 19, and 16 and well, unbelievably enough, they may all end up, and it was not sort of expected, they might all end up being scientists and engineers, though it didn’t start that way.
My oldest daughter is already famous by the way, because she identified some big controversy at the UN that they were covering up that they have very few women in positions of power and she exposed this. Her work was cited in the New York Times, but also the UN ended up then shifting gears and they had her put together a whole exhibition on this topic. So it was one of the largest public exhibitions they had at the UN that was highlighting women in the history of the UN and how women have not been given the prominence that they should be and my daughter became, for somebody who is so young, it was unbelievable how much attention she got, but then she got a little frustrated working at the UN and seeing how it was hard to make a change. So she decided to go back to medical school.
My son Damis is interested in environmental geology, and so he’s also going towards the sciences and my other son is majoring in a dual degree in physics and engineering, and my youngest is the smart one in the family, she’s still in high school but she is interested in astrophysics and aerospace engineering.
My daughter Demetra has made a name for herself as well. She is now one of the top female high school wrestlers in the country, and you know, how they have varsity teams, varsity wrestling, she is the captain of the boys varsity wrestling team and by the way, you may have seen recently in the news there was this controversy in Texas about this girl was transgender and she was taking steroids to become male but she ended up wresting against girls even though she was in transition. This year she had an undefeated season and she became champion, well, she was undefeated in the scholastic season, but during the tournament she lost to one person, my daughter. So my daughter beat the transgender boy, I didn’t know it either. I was following the story in the news and then her coach texted us that last summer she had wrestled against him and beat him.
TNH: How often do you get to visit Kastoria?
GY: We’re hoping to go this year. We went two years ago, so we try to go every couple of years.
TNH: How difficult was it to leave academia and open your own business in the pharmaceutical industry?
GY: There were really two separate things that got me into this world, one having to do with my father again and one having to do with Len. On the one hand, I was doing very well by some standards in the academic world. At a very young age I was offered professor positions and had gotten very large awards to fund research in my laboratory for several million dollars and my father at that time was very disappointed that I was pursuing this academic science career and when I won one particular award and this was in 1988 and it was for $2.5 million and that was a lot of money, it still is a lot of money, but in 1988 that was a lot more money and it guaranteed funding for my laboratory for eight years back then and I thought that it would show to my father that I had made it, that my science was so worthwhile that they were giving me all this money.
I went home to Queens because I always used to go home on Sunday to have dinner with the family and with my parents and I thought this would impress them and he said two things that I’ll never forget, he listened to this and the first thing he said was (in Greek-) “Exactly how much of that $2.5 million goes into your pocket?” That was the first thing and then when I tried to explain, yeah, but it’s the research and you don’t understand my goal is maybe I could do important science and someday I could maybe come up with something that could maybe help people suffering from disease. My dad said, because my dad was no fool, and I might choke up here, too, but he goes, “I brought my family here,” he was a big believer, like a lot of Greeks from that generation, in America. “I brought my family to the greatest country on the face of this planet and in this country if you really think you can do something like help cure disease,” and I had told them that into my pocket I was making $35,000 a year which by the way you don’t appreciate it now but in 1988 it was a lot of money, but he even with no education was making more than that. So he goes on, “this is the greatest country on the face of this planet,” he was a big believer, “and in this country if you really think you can do something as important as help cure a disease you can make a hell of a lot more than $35,000 a year doing it.”
So I thought I was going to impress my father and I left once again feeling like I had let him down, and then within a week I get a phone call from this guy who I didn’t know at all and he called me because back then it was in the very early days of cloning genes and there were very few people who had cloned genes and I happened to work with, though I was a young guy, but I already had a reputation because I had worked with one of the world’s premiere gene cloners which is another interesting story how I got into this field because once again it’s all the Greek connections. Because I had a reputation and because the guy I had worked with was so well known, Len talked to him and he said you’re never going to get one of these established, older superstars in gene cloning now, but if you want some guy who could be the next young superstar you got to talk to this guy Yancopoulos. So Len just sort of cold called me about getting together with him to help him start this company.
Honestly, if I didn’t have that juxtaposition of my dad being disappointed in me and sort of saying do something bigger and he was always into doing something in business and Len calling, that was the magic that sort of said, okay I’m going to walk. Nobody had ever walked away, by the way, from this actually pretty famous grant at the time, it was the Lucille P. Markey award and nobody else ever walked away from a $2.5 million grant. It was unheard of, and I ended up becoming somewhat legendary because people thought I was crazy. Then, about 20 years later I was invited back to be the speaker at this event about all these people that had gotten this award and everybody else said why didn’t we do that?
Part of it is also, I really hit off right away with this guy Len and we’re still you don’t see us as much but we haven’t changed in the 28 whatever years it’s been. We’re exactly the same, we love each other but we argue, it’s like brothers. We argue, incessantly and we’re always debating and we’re always taking different sides in an argument, but it all helps the process because you have two people arguing it out and then we engage with [others in the company] Jay Markowitz there, Neil Stahl, and Drew Murphy and we engage everybody else in the different sides of the argument and it leads, I think, to a much better discussion and a much better decision at the end of the day when you’re sitting there having a high level debate over everything constantly instead of just one person saying do this or the other person saying do that.
So, nothing has really changed, I love it, I mean I loved him from the beginning, but our interactions and our relationship hasn’t really changed in the entire time and I knew from literally the beginning I just, something hit it off and I could see that he was a very honest guy who was very ethically motivated and you could see a lot of his motivation. He has a severely disabled son who was born with neurological deficits and one of the original, founding goals of Regeneron was to regenerate the nervous system and a lot of it was for his son and we’re still, believe it or not, almost thirty years later, we’re still working on that because it’s so hard and it’s related to Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s, so we’re still working on all those diseases.
In the meantime whatever success we had ended up being in a totally relatively unrelated area, but I knew from the beginning that he was just not only very smart, but just very ethical and very honest and very well-motivated and he told me something that my father also taught me and he said he learned this from his father and he was also very close to his father which very much was consistent with how I was raised. He said life was about doing well by doing good. And that was how I was raised and really he still lives by that and he really hasn’t changed and he’s never disappointed me in terms of his ethics and his viewpoint.
I believe we are the most ethically-driven company. The thing that makes us different I think we’re more like the legacy of Roy Vagelos’ Merck, which we all aspire to both me and Len, we aspire to this, but Roy was the greatest paradigm of doing things ethically and doing things based on the science. And almost every other company has moved away from that. They’re doing things for commercial reasons and to make money, and Roy said well, if you do things based on the science to try to improve the human condition and you’re ethical about it, everything else, the money, will take care of itself. We’ve tried to live by that and I think that we’ve, huge credit to Len because he’s never disappointed me, I think that we have stayed that way and especially when we actually brought Roy on board to provide a double check to make sure that we stayed ethical and based on the science, but Roy is a great mentor and I think Len and I have literally devoted our lives to try to live up to his example and bringing him in was just the actual physical symbol of what we’ve been trying to do and live up to.
But I should just mention that when I first went into science I was in a different field and very early on when I was in college I was excited by something unrelated. So in 1975 my dad tells me Roy Vagelos should be your hero. Then a couple of years later I’m going to college and I’m doing protein crystallography, a different field of science, and I’m struggling and not doing that well. Then they cloned the first gene and the authors of the paper that cloned the first gene were Efstratiadis, Maniatis, and Kafatos at Harvard. Three Greeks cloned the first gene or the first cDNA it’s called, and I literally, I read the paper and went wow, maybe I’m in the wrong field, maybe I should go into this new field of cloning genes because maybe this is what Greeks are good at. So Roy Vagelos was my hero but then I went into cloning genes because of Efstratiadis, Maniatis, and Kafatos, and ironically enough, all of those guys, but particularly now Maniatis who is still a very famous guy and is always being honored. He is a very prominent professor at Columbia and I talk and deal with him all the time. I had a phone conference with him just yesterday, so it’s ironic how people who are your heroes, Roy Vagelos or Tom Maniatis, you actually get to meet them so it is funny sometimes how things in life you’re inspired by and for me certainly these Greek connections, Roy Vagelos is my hero, and I go into what I go into because of Efstratiadis, Maniatis, and Kafatos.
We have a lot of Greeks here, Aris Baras is running our genetics center.
TNH: The campus here is impressive, but how did you start out?
GY: We had 10,000 square feet, sort of the equivalent of what would be that little corner of that building and then we slowly took over almost that entire building. Then we needed more space, and started building additional buildings. So now we have nine buildings.
TNH: What goes on in the buildings?
GY: So, it’s largely research, I mean there’s supporting activities here that we have that help the research people and we also have the people who are involved in providing our drugs to the patients, but mostly here, this is mostly our research campus and we do everything from what they call developing antibody drugs to gene sequencing. We have the world’s largest human sequencing effort going here that’s headed by this young Greek guy Aris Baras, the largest human genome sequencing effort is going on, on the other side of the street.
Up in Albany, in Rensselaer is where we have our manufacturing facilities and we also built another manufacturing facility in Ireland. Then we have some business offices in Basking Ridge, NJ and a couple of other places. It’s where we actually have some clinical people, so it’s not research laboratories, it’s where we have some people who are involved in organizing clinical trials and also doing the biostatistics involved in that.
TNH: The company has 6,000 employees, how many with advanced degrees?
GY: 630 with advanced degrees, 500-1,000 PhDs and I would say another 2,000 who have technical degrees either Master’s or undergraduate degrees in the sciences. Then the other half of the people are probably more support type people.
TNH: How many drugs have been approved so far?
GY: So far it’s four, but in the next 1-2 months we hope to have two more, important ones including one for severe atopic dermatitis or eczema, but we’re also testing the same drug [for other ailments] and it looks very promising for asthma and an assortment of other allergic diseases. That’s the first drug, and then the second drug that we hope to be approved is for rheumatoid arthritis which we’re also very excited about. Our other four drugs are for eye diseases it’s the leading drug that actually saves vision and actually gives back vision lost to people who have macular degeneration or diabetic eye disease, so it’s a very important drug. We have another drug for a rare disease called cold induced inflammatory syndrome, we have another drug for lowering cholesterol and hopefully preventing heart disease, and we have a cancer drug. So those are the four approved and we hope to get two more in the next two months.
TNH: A remarkable achievement.
GY: In the entire world last year there were only 20 drugs approved by the FDA and half of them were actually not new drugs, they were generics. Our company by itself just in the next two months is going to get hopefully two important, important new drugs approved.
It took us over 20 years for our first approval and that was because what we really did which is very unlike any other company is we built the whole foundation and an assembly line to make the drug and since then we’ve had at least one drug almost every year and now we’re hoping to even accelerate, two in the next couple of months and we’re hoping to get a couple more maybe even either at the end of the year or the beginning of next year. So we built a machine that can really now produce regularly because it’s all coming from our own science.
Most other companies buy opportunities and they’re licensing. We’re actually doing from the beginning science all the way to the manufacturing of everything. And we’re, we may be, I have to say, we’re certainly the only company in history of our size that has produced these many drugs already and such a pipeline all internally. It’s never been done before so we are very proud of that.
In the job I do, it’s not really how many hours you’re grinding away, I think that for the people who are really exceptional at this they are sort of addicted to it, basically it’s all what’s going on in there, and basically you can’t really turn it off and the most important ideas can happen when you’re at your kid’s soccer game or running on a trail in the woods.
The most important thing I think is to have your mind be free and be creative because what you have do is you have think of new things that nobody’s ever thought about before, so you can’t do that by whatever and like I said I consider it part of the training of my children. If you ask my kids, hopefully, you’ll see several of them at the parade. We talk about these things all the time. My viewpoint is that you don’t really understand what you’re doing if you can’t explain it to a smart fifth grader. That’s my perspective and so I explain what we work on and talk about to my kids and sometimes they ask questions and their perspective is often some of the best that I’ve gotten because it’s not biased by their experiences, and they’re very smart. I think my kids are very smart so a lot of ideas come from either conversations that we have amongst ourselves all the scientists around here whether it’s Len or Neil Stahl or all these great people we have internally but also some of my good ideas come just from talking with my kids and they say well why don’t you guys do this and I say wow, why didn’t we think of that, because they think with a virgin mind, so basically when your job involves thinking you’re doing it all the time.
TNH: What takes more of your time, managing the business or the scientific aspects?
GY: I think I’ve been a very, very lucky guy. In life, if you’re going to do anything most of the time I think people who do big things are doing it with other people, and so I’ve been very lucky in that both on the business side I have people like Len and also Roy who are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting. On the science side which is where I concentrate more I also have incredibly brilliant scientific collaborators who have been with me some of them are relatively new, but some of them have been here almost from the beginning. So what I do most of my day, I just have meetings with all these smart people and they end up doing all the work and I just help cross-fertilize some of the ideas and maybe help out a little bit but my job hasn’t really changed in 28 years. It’s just meeting with my colleagues and brainstorming, that’s what we do around here.
TNH: Regeneron stock is doing very well, do you follow it regularly?
GY: Our market is up now, it varies every minute, I don’t actually follow it, Len follows it, so we’re about 372, and we’re a $40 billion company now. I don’t follow it day-to-day, I just follow it over the long term. I believe what Roy Vagelos says, you do the science, you come up with important drugs for patients and then the stock price and everything else will take care of itself and I really don’t worry about it day to day. Even weeks go by sometimes and I don’t even look at the stock price, but honestly we’ve done well over time, and back then, when we went public in 1991 it was, at the time, one of the record IPOs in the industry I think we raised about $100 million which was huge back then. It set some sort of record.
TNH: Where did the name Regeneron come from?
GY: The funny thing is, the title of my high school science project was The Molecular Basis of Regeneration, so I was always interested in regeneration, but it’s sort of coincidental. What happened was in the early days of the company we were talking about the nervous system and regrowing nerve cells and somebody, I believe it was Mike Brown suggested why don’t we come up with regenerating neurons or regeneuron and then Al Gilman said that doesn’t sound right and it doesn’t sound as much about genes, so why don’t we just drop the u and he made it Regeneron, so it came from three of our board of advisors.
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