Interview - George Yancopoulos

The co-president and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. says new medical technologies and drugs won’t keep coming unless we spend on basic science

- Caroline Chen

The biotech industry has seen a boom of new technologies and drugs in the past few years. What technologies are you most excited about?

It’s all about genetics and DNA. Regeneron has now sequenced a quarter of a million people and has their health records. This is a resource that’s never been possible or available before. It used to take 10 to 15 years to do the genetics testing, and then you’d start the drug development, which takes another 10 to 15 years. Now we’ve cut out those first 15.

Are there ethical issues or other drawbacks to increasing the accessibility of these technologies? One guy recently injected his arm muscles with the gene-editing tool Crispr to see if he could make himself more buff.