In the race to develop a coronavirus treatment, Regeneron thinks it has the inside track
The novel #coronavirus arrived at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ sprawling campus like any other parcel: inside a cardboard box.
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — The novel coronavirus arrived at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ sprawling campus like any other parcel.
Inside a cardboard box, shipped to the company’s scientists, was a small tube. And inside it was a fragment of genetic code belonging to 2019-nCoV, the infectious agent that has killed more than 400 people since the start of the outbreak in China. Because it was just a snippet of the full genome, the virus wasn’t actually infectious.
It also wasn’t hard to obtain. The sender was one of the many vendors that will whip up synthetic genomes for a fee — a process that, for biotech companies, has become nearly as commoditized as food delivery.
“You can’t get it on Amazon,”
