Responsibility & Culture
George’s Five Principles for Radical Innovation: How to Think Differently and Make a Better World
March 31, 2025
Pioneering a new era in biopharmaceutical innovation
By: Regeneron
To create a better world, you have to imagine a different future and make it happen. This is particularly true today as our world grapples with mounting health challenges and the need for innovation in the biopharmaceutical space has reached an all-time high. Emerging infectious diseases, the rise in chronic conditions, the pressures of an aging population, the persistent reality of unmet medical needs and more require innovative and compassionate action. This is the driving force behind our work at Regeneron, where we have chosen to undertake one of the most difficult and humbling endeavors humankind can pursue: creating new medicines.
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Consider this:
- Only 12% of investigational medicines that enter clinical trials eventually receive FDA approval.1
- There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies in the United States, yet only ~50 new medicines are approved each year.2
To defy these odds, George D. Yancopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., co-Founder, co-Chairman, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Regeneron, believes you must think differently, which prompted the development of his principles for radical innovation.
Defying the Odds
George D. Yancopoulos, MD, PhD
Co-Founder, Board co-Chairman, President and Chief Scientific Officer
“For 20 of our 35+ years, Regeneron was not considered super successful because we had no medicines on the market. However, we have now achieved a run of FDA approvals and blockbusters that our industry hasn’t seen before,” says George. “We wanted to build a different type of company that could repeatedly deliver important new medicines from its own labs. We realized we needed to create totally new technologies, to do something nobody else had tried before, to allow us to discover new medicines.”
Today, Regeneron has over 15,000 employees worldwide and in 2024, garnered $14.2 billion in revenue while investing $5.1 billion in research and development. George attributes Regeneron’s success to playing a much bigger and longer game than most companies and to his special formula for innovation. He calls the approach Radical Innovation for Humanity, and it’s how Regeneron stays at the cutting edge of science to create better science and, ultimately, a better world. As medicine knows no race or border, the best medical advances require the largest data sets. In other words, science demands diversity.
The Five Principles
- Challenge everything: Take a beginner’s mindset and challenge all assumptions.
- Be willing to risk failure: To achieve great advancements, you must understand that every day, you are risking failure.
- Identify fundamental truths: Simplify complex truths to their core essence.
- Identify limiting bottlenecks: Understand what is preventing progress.
- Create simple solutions: Use fundamental truths to overcome bottlenecks and create breakthrough platforms.
Smita Pillai
Senior Vice President, Culture and Inclusion Development
"George’s principles for Radical Innovation for Humanity are integral to our broader vision of building a culture rooted in innovation, which incorporates the myriad backgrounds and perspectives that make a group’s culture unique,” said Smita Pillai, Senior Vice President, Culture and Development. "We are committed to establishing our leadership voice in order to inspire future innovators — the most recent example being George’s talk at Davos. "
Radical Innovation for Humanity in Action
For nearly four decades, Regeneron has adhered to these five core principles and their application has led to numerous groundbreaking inventions, including Regeneron’s VelocImmune® technology, a platform responsible for more FDA-approved medicines than any other in biotech history. Through the culmination of vision, persistence through failure, and a willingness to challenge fundamental truths, this innovation allowed Regeneron to develop some of our most impactful antibody medicines.
Here’s how VelocImmune came to life using the five principles:
When Regeneron was founded, monoclonal antibodies were still in their infancy. In fact, there was only one FDA-approved monoclonal antibody, as scientific understanding and technical capabilities were limited. But, where others saw limitations, Regeneron saw opportunity in the potential of these natural defense mechanisms to combat disease.
Inspired by his groundbreaking graduate research at Columbia University while studying under his mentor, renowned geneticist Fred W. Alt, Ph.D, George asked a bold question no one else had: Could we turn mice into living factories for human antibodies? At the time, scientists believed antibodies could only be derived from animals, and those foreign proteins were often rejected by the human immune system. But what if mice could be engineered to carry human immune genes?
Although the technology to achieve this did not exist at the time, Regeneron spent over a decade challenging existing dogmas to ultimately engineer the VelocImmune mouse, a remarkable tool that is now capable of producing precisely humanized immune genes.
Today, VelocImmune has become the foundation of some of Regeneron’s most successful medicines, removing bottlenecks in drug discovery and creating a simpler solution to advance the treatment landscape for millions of patients. This innovation overcame the limitations of traditional platforms, avoiding immune rejection from nonhuman components and tightly targeting therapeutic needs.
At Regeneron, radical innovation is inextricably linked to building a better world through better science. While these principles drove George’s many innovations and scientific breakthroughs, we believe that they can also be applied to all aspects of solving the world’s greatest challenges.
As George shared, “The application of these principles could be pivotal in the fight against myriad existential threats — from disease and the healthcare burden to climate change and environmental threats to sociopolitical drivers that distract and divide us from a united global effort for human survival and advancement.”