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When Donald Trump received the CEOs of 10 drug companies at the White House in March to discuss the coronavirus, he was eager to hear the views of one of them, whom he affectionately addressed as “Lenny.”
This “Lenny” is Len Schleifer, a golfer friend of Trump and the CEO of Regeneron, a biotech company that was brought into the limelight after the president claimed that the Covid-19 drug he produced cured him. It can do the same for millions of people.
Following the publication of a video in which Trump appeared on Wednesday, in which he called Regeneron’s antibody treatment a “miracle,” the company’s shares rose 60% from their value in January.
But the president’s favorable testimony has put Regeneron in an awkward position, explaining that the drug has not yet been fully tested in clinical trials, is not guaranteed to work for everyone, and will be in place by the end of the year. available only to a few hundred thousand patients.
Schleifer, who trained as a neurosurgeon, founded Regeneron in 1988. For a long time, the company did not prove to be very useful, since in its first 20 years of existence it could not produce any successful drugs. However, Regeneron later became extremely popular thanks to the discovery of a way to inject human DNA into mice so that their immune systems could produce human antibodies when a virus was injected into them. This allowed the company to quickly develop a treatment when Covid-19 appeared.
“They have the latest technology to develop antibodies,” said Yatin Suneja, an analyst at the Guggenheim Foundation. “No one else could do what they did.”
Regeneron has already delivered two successful drugs: Eylea, to treat macular degeneration, and Dupixent, an injection to treat eczema and asthma. Last year, the company earned $ 4.6 billion in sales from Eylea and $ 2.3 billion in sales from Dupixent.
The company’s success propelled Schleifer into the New York elite. He joined the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester, New York, where he met Trump before running for president.
Trump even bought shares in Regeneron, although government records show he sold them between June 2016 and June 2017, making a profit of between $ 50,000 and $ 100,000.
Analysts say the company’s scientific expertise, and not necessarily its director’s political ties, was decisive in the race for a treatment for the coronavirus.
Early studies showed that the drug could reduce recovery time from 13 days to six, but only for patients whose immune systems have not yet activated their own antibody response. For those whose immune systems have already started to fight the virus, Regeneron therapy appears to be less effective, which is why scientists are reluctant to call it a remedy.
The fact that Trump received treatment so soon after his coronavirus diagnosis suggests that the drug was already well known in the White House. “Somebody knows the latest scientific discoveries there,” said Barry Bloom, a professor of public health at Harvard University.
Regeneron announced this week that he has asked the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize emergency use of the antibody combination, although Trump said Wednesday that he has already given his personal consent.
If the drug is approved, the company said it is ready to produce 50,000 doses immediately and another 300,000 by January. But if everyone infected followed President Trump’s impulse and requested this drug, supplies would quickly run out, as the United States currently reports about 50,000 new cases daily.
Regeneron’s rival, Eli Lilly, is producing a similar treatment, which it can produce faster as it derives its antibodies from a single source, estimating that it will be able to circulate 100,000 doses this month.
The Trump administration has already bought the $ 300,000 starting dose of Regeneron for $ 450 million, which it plans to offer to patients for free. After that, the company said it did not know how much it would charge for a dose.
Still, Regeneron has every interest in making political allies, Suneja notes, given that both Republicans and Democrats have threatened to impose price caps in response to public dissatisfaction with rising drug costs in the United States.
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