Stephen J Gaudet – Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

Stephen Gaudet might have a vested interest in some of the products his employer produces for a certain patient population. He, too, is a diabetic and thus at greater risk for eye-related retinopathy disease.

Stephen J Gaudet | Regeneron Pharmaceuticals | Executive Director, Assistant General Counsel

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals offers hope to such patients through EYLEA and EYLEA HD, injective therapies of varying doses of aflibercept, a fusion protein that inhibits vascular growth by inhibiting VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) that plays a role in, e.g., macular degeneration.  Diabetic patients may develop complications, e.g., in the eye, due to leaky blood vessels. Regeneron has developed a fusion protein, Eylea, in a 2-milligram dose format, which received market approval in 2011. Recently, Regeneron developed and was approved for an 8-milligram dose to treat patients.

“My last exam indicated that I may be a candidate for EYLEA,” he explains. “As a potential patient, I certainly am thrilled that a company such as Regeneron is around to help people like me.”

Gaudet earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Georgetown University and was then appointed to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After a period of time, he returned to Boston, where he attended Suffolk University Law School. He attended law school in the evenings and worked as a technical specialist in a law firm during the day. He has been able to apply all his skills at Regeneron, where he’s just celebrated his seventh anniversary in the legal department.

As Gaudet tells Vanguard in June, his time at Regeneron in Tarrytown, New York, reminds him of his long-ago dream job as a staff fellow during the early 1990s at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There, his neurodegeneration research was recognized by the National Academy of Science (receiving a National Research Council award). Gaudet says he finds his work at Regeneron equally rewarding and his colleagues as stimulating as those from the NIH.

“Like the NIH, this place is to a scientist what a playground is to a child,” he says. “You’re surrounded by brilliant people and have access to talent and technology that few people do outside of here. Science, not politics or interpersonal issues, serves as the driving force. We’re all in a quest to help patients cope with various diseases.”

Down to a science

Gaudet’s group is responsible for manufacturing and bioprocessing as related to therapeutics being developed at Regeneron.  This begins with developing a cell line(s) through to a drug substance ready for formulation.

Gaudet has several patent attorneys in his group, each of whom—like him—has a doctorate in an area of biology that augments their law degree.  His group also has a very talented, experienced lawyer specializing in trade secret law.

As a scientist wedded to scientific research, he was suspicious of patent law. He considered it to be antithetical to the dissemination of scientific understanding.

Family life also entered the equation, Gaudet had to take a leave of absence from the NIH to return to Boston in 1993. While he thought it would be just a year’s absence, he met his future wife while working in Greater Boston.

“Love won out,” he says. “But I had to ask myself, ‘What do I do now?’”

Poised for patent law

His researcher friends at NIH helped him find the answer. Some of them were enrolled in evening law classes. Patent law, they assured him, wasn’t antithetical to scientific advancement.

Suffolk University Law School offers evening classes, so Gaudet enrolled while working as a technical specialist at an IP law firm. By 1998, he had his law degree.

He went on to practice patent law at Boston firms, such as Nutter, McClennen & Fish and McDermott Will & Emery, where he was invited to go in-house with one of his clients, Abbott Laboratories—now Abbvie.

In 2017, Gaudet joined Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Since then, it’s been Regeneron, and according to Gaudet, he has enjoyed his time at Regeneron.

“It’s a great place to be, and I feel quite fortunate,” he says.

But science-minded as Gaudet is, he’s open about a spiritual component that doesn’t conflict with the natural world.

“Science versus religion – the two address the same question but through a different lens,” says Gaudet, whose academic credentials include a graduate degree in religious studies from Harvard University.  Later, he was invited back to teach courses in the religious studies program. “The single embodiment of religion and science can happen. More times than not, I’ve found scientists who are comfortable with their own scientific achievements to be open to the existence of a higher being—God or whatever name you wish—and to ontological reality.”

He’s even written a well-received book, “A Christian Utopia: Paul’s Community of Equality and Justice,” and states retrieving the apostle’s vision for a world that should ponder what might follow mortal life is imperative. And, as Gaudet says, he’s far from the first scientist to accept the possibility of a higher power and/or existence.

For example, there was the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre, who theorized that the recession of nearby galaxies could be explained by an expanding universe, which contradicted Albert Einstein’s notion of a static universe (hence his cosmological constant). Another of Gaudet’s examples is Gregor Mendel, the 19th-century Augustinian friar and abbot who founded the modern science of genetics.

Gaudet enjoys reading philosophy and theology in his spare time, particularly those authors who bridge the scientific-religious chasm. He fulfills his responsibility in a hybrid style, dividing his time between Regeneron’s base in New York and vacationing in his Southern New Hampshire home. When time allows, you might find Gaudet on the golf course, or as he puts it, “the woods adjoining the course.”.

“The best is yet to come, and I’m enjoying what I’m doing on the legal and scientific fronts,” he says. “After 25 years of this, I don’t need to make these statements unless I really mean it, and I do.”