Christos Kyratsous

As head of infectious disease research at Regeneron, the Tarrytown, N.Y.-based biotech firm with $7.9 billion in annual revenue, Kyratsous is leading one of pharma’s most watched—and in the eyes of many, most hopeful—efforts to develop drugs to treat and prevent COVID-19. Regeneron specializes in antibody medicines, developing drugs that mimic a human immune response to infection.

Kyratsous, a native of Greece, and his team previously used that strategy to develop a therapy for Ebola patients—a drug that proved so effective in reducing mortality in a clinical trial last year that the study came to an early close. (The antibody cocktail, which is currently under review by the FDA, is being used to treat Ebola patients in the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) Kyratsous and his colleagues have been hustling to develop an antibody cocktail to target COVID-19 since January; despite the challenges of operating at the epicenter of America’s pandemic this spring, Kyratsous’s team got the drug from lab to clinic in record time. Preliminary data from Regeneron’s antibody trial targeting COVID-19 is expected later in September.