Garo Armen

Garo Armen
'
Birthplace	Turkey
Birth date	31 January 1953
Lived in	Turkey, New York City, New York
Resides in	New York City
Profession	Businessman, Philanthropist
Languages	Armenian, English, Turkish
Ethnicities	Armenian
Dialects	Western Armenian

Garo H. Armen (Armenian: Կարո Արմեն) is a Turkish-born American businessman of Armenian descent. He is the co-founder of Agenus, Inc. and the founder of the Children of Armenia Fund (COAF) non-profit organization.

Biography

Dr. Garo Armen was born on January 31, 1953, in Turkey. He moved to New York City in 1970. According to the New York Times he became a messenger boy for a nonprofit Armenian organization. In the article Armen stated, "I worked five hours a day, five days a week. I got two bucks an hour…and that was a lot of money for me." His second job was in the kitchen of the Lawyers’ Club but it only lasted a day. "I thought I’d learn to cook. Instead, they asked me to wash dishes. I had to climb into the soup bucket, which was huge, and clean it out. Shortly after, I got a job in a bank as a clerk."

One night in 1978, in the middle of the energy crisis, Armen was driving home when he stopped at a gas station. "I noticed that gas pumps only had two digits [for the per gallon price]," in an interview with The Scientist "Realizing that continued rising prices would force the pumps to be replaced in the near future, I borrowed $5,000 to invest in gas pumps." Soon enough, virtually every gas pump in America was replaced – and Armen had made $20,000. His interest in business was piqued, and had already paid off.

By 1979, he received his PhD in physical chemistry from the City University of New York. Armen served as Senior Vice President of Research for Dean Witter Reynolds (1986–1989), focusing on the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and with E.F. Hutton & Company as first Vice President (1981–1986). Before entering finance, Armen had been an associate professor at the Merchant Marine Academy and a research associate at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Armen's journey into drug development began when his mother died from breast cancer in 1973. The two shared a one-room Brooklyn apartment where Armen administered her morphine shots until she died. In 1994, Armen was approached by Pramod Srivastava, then a biochemist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, about the possibility of developing Oncophage from a clinical and commercial perspective. The treatment involved removing a patient's tumor cells, isolating and fortifying the cellular proteins that normally alert the immune system to disease, and re-injecting the proteins into the patient. In 1994, Armen co-founded Antigenics with Srivastava.

Career and business ventures

Agenus

Garo Armen is chairman and chief executive officer of Agenus Inc., formerly known as Antigenics Inc., a biotechnology company that discovered Oncophage, a personalized cancer vaccine recently approved in Russia for patients with earlier-stage kidney cancer and currently under review with the European Regulatory Agency. The clinical history of Oncophage was described in detail in a story in the Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2007. In another interview with Business Week and CBS, Armen described how the idea of personalized medicine tailored to the patient led to his launching Antigenics with $250,000 of his own money, plus the backing of a few friends. He was initially stirred by the results from animal testing; the vaccine cured 80% of mice in the early stages of cancer with virtually no side effects.

In 2000 Antigenics went public. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreed to review the vaccine on an accelerated schedule when the company filed for approval, and Antigenics began recruiting 728 patients with kidney cancer for the phase 3 trial, the largest study conducted in the world.

Ultimately, 118 cancer centers participated in the trial, 63 of them outside the U.S.. The largest group of patients, 172, was treated in Russia. In April 2008, Oncophage was approved by the Russian Ministry of Health, making Russia the first country in the world to approve a personalized cancer vaccine in patients with earlier-stage kidney cancer. On the day Antigenics announced Oncophage's approval, CNBC ran a lead story on the personalized cancer vaccine as well as generating a debate on both television and their website on the regulatory landscape in Russia versus USA – the question posed to the audience was whether America had fallen behind the rest of the world in terms of approving innovative drugs? CNBC concluded with the following statement "The Antigenics story, of course, is making big news in Russia. It's the top story, for example, on this news web site. According to our Senior Economics Correspondent Steve Liesman--who used to live and work in Russia where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting--the headline says, Russia becomes the first country in the world to sell an American cancer vaccine." Armen is now focusing the company's efforts in Europe, and hopes to receive marketing approval for Oncophage in early 2010.

Elan

While retaining his position at Antigenics, Garo Armen became chairman of the board of directors for the biopharmaceutical company Élan Corporation plc from mid-2002 through 2004. The company was on the brink of collapse brought down by an accounting scandal that earned it the label of "Europe's Enron". During his tenure, Armen became the architect of the company's $1 billion restructuring program by strengthening Élan's finances, refocusing the group on its core clinical development business and returning shareholder value. On the day that Armen assumed chairmanship, the Wall Street Journal and BBC discussed the restructuring plan in some detail. He said "(our) first task is clean house…the world is concerned we’ll file for bankruptcy".

By 2004, the Sunday Times of London hailed Armen as the chairman that saved the company stating that “it is one of the great corporate recovery stories.” Armen commented “ For about three months… every day, every hour was critical. Any one of many things could have made the company collapse. We were on the hook every single day until we had an agreement to sell our first major asset.”

Armen Partners

Prior to founding Antigenics in 1994, Armen established Armen Partners, a money management firm specializing in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and was the originator of the widely publicized[citation needed] creation of the Immunex Lederle oncology business in 1993.

Humanitarian initiatives

Dr. Garo Garo is the founder and chairman of the Children of Armenia Fund (COAF), a non-profit, non-governmental organization that aims to empower rural Armenians through child-centered community development programs. Working mainly with children and youth, COAF implements education, health, social, and economic development programs to comprehensively address rural development. It has also undertaken the improvement of more than 140 infrastructures in villages, including renovation of schools, health clinics, kindergartens, community centers, school cafeterias, creativity labs, roads, and irrigation systems.

In 2014, COAF began developing a new strategy to address systemic gaps in rural Armenia- the COAF SMART Initiative. COAF SMART aims at further advancing rural communities by increasing accessibility to comprehensive programs, technology, and opportunities in a state-of-the-art hub. The first COAF SMART Center is located in Debet villaage, Lori province, Armenia. It is open to the surrounding rural populations, with a SMART Curriculum beginning at age three. The Center provides education based on "3H Theory" - Head, Heart, Hand. COAF envisions the SMART Center as a model for rural development and the beginning of a mindset change for a whole generation. Since opening their first campus in Lori, COAF aims to launch a SMART Center in each region of Armenia.

COAF Annual Holiday Gala & Awards dinner has become a premier event in New York raising millions of dollars from a diverse and committed community, affecting more than 107,000 people in Armenian villages.

The Daily News under the headline “Celebrating New Yorkers Who Make A Difference” highlighted Garo Armen's philanthropic achievements. The article quoted a report by Strategem Consulting International, an independent firm hired by the United Nations, which stated “between 2003 and 2005, life in Karakert, known as Children of Armenia’s first model village, improved dramatically.”

Open letter

In response to an open letter by some diasporans regarding the church-state conflict in 2025/26, Garo wrote the following open letter of his own:

“

“An open letter published by Mediamax and promoted as the voice of “diaspora leaders” warns that Armenia is risking a rupture with the diaspora and urges Armenians abroad to pursue “political remedies and legal actions” through host governments in response to the current church–state confrontation. That framing is misleading, and that prescription is dangerous. The Armenian Apostolic Church is not a building and not a hierarchy. The Church is the people. Armenian history makes that plain: ordinary men and women carried faith and identity through genocide, exile, repression, war, and loss. Institutions survive only when they serve the people who sustain them. When the burden flows in only one direction—upward—faith turns into weight. That is why renewal and accountability strengthen the Church; they do not weaken it. It is also necessary to speak plainly about representation. The diaspora is not a committee. It is millions of Armenians across dozens of countries, with different experiences, politics, and priorities. A small circle—however prominent—does not speak for the whole. Many diasporans supported Armenia’s democratic transformation and the long-overdue effort to dismantle state capture and corruption. Others opposed that change from the first day, and some have repeatedly aligned themselves with political elements within the Mother See to stand against the post-2018 government and its reforms. The present letter reads less like a national warning and more like the continuation of that longstanding political project. The letter’s most inflammatory comparison—suggesting Armenia is approaching a rupture “not even the Ottoman Empire or the Soviet Union were able to do”—should never have been written. Those regimes attempted to erase Armenians. The Republic of Armenia is a sovereign state with an elected government, political pluralism, and a constitutional order. Dragging genocide memory and Soviet trauma into today’s political combat is not moral clarity; it is moral vandalism. The call for diasporans to enlist foreign governments for “political remedies and legal actions” is equally misguided. Diasporans have every right—indeed, an obligation—to advocate for Armenia’s security and future in the countries where they live. But internationalizing Armenia’s internal disputes in this way turns diaspora communities into instruments of pressure against the Armenian state. It undermines sovereignty, deepens division between homeland and diaspora, and hands leverage to forces that do not wish Armenia well. Armenia’s destiny cannot be negotiated in foreign capitals by self-appointed representatives. This moment also requires honesty about the state Armenia inherited. After independence, Armenia endured decades of systemic corruption and institutional decay. That legacy weakened the state, hollowed out public trust, and left the country vulnerable. The 2018 democratic breakthrough was a turning point: the public demanded a government accountable to citizens rather than to entrenched networks. That work remains unfinished, but the direction has been clear—greater accountability, greater transparency, greater public ownership of the state. No one forgets the devastating war with Azerbaijan and the tragedy that followed. The pain is national and permanent. But the roots of that catastrophe extend beyond any single year or administration: decades of strategic neglect, complacency, and misgovernance left Armenia and Artsakh dangerously exposed. Armenians paid the price in blood. That history cannot be rewritten to protect reputations. Since then, Armenia has operated under extreme regional pressure and hostility from Azerbaijan and Turkey. In that environment, the government led by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has pursued a difficult, imperfect, but vital course: strengthening state institutions, widening Armenia’s diplomatic and security options, and pushing toward a framework that reduces the risk of recurring war. Armenia is now engaging with major power centers and regional partners in ways that would have seemed unimaginable for a small, isolated state not long ago. That does not make challenges disappear, but it does create space for stability and for prosperity—something Armenia has rarely had the chance to pursue since independence. Against that backdrop, the attempt by a narrow group to present itself as “the diaspora,” to cloak a political agenda in religious language, and to urge external pressure campaigns against Armenia’s elected government is not nation-building. It is factionalism dressed as virtue—often entangled with personal, institutional, or financial interests that are not disclosed and not neutral. Armenia needs a strong state and a strong Church. Both are possible—together—when leadership is credible, when institutions are accountable, and when politics does not hide behind vestments. Faith should not be used as a weapon against democratic legitimacy. The Church should renew itself through integrity and reform, and the state must uphold the rule of law and protect freedom of worship without allowing any institution to become a parallel political authority. The diaspora’s highest duty is not to escalate internal Armenian conflict. It is to strengthen Armenia—by investing, building institutions, supporting education and resilience, helping displaced families, modernizing capacity, and backing the hard work of reform rather than sabotaging it from afar. Armenia is not a stage for old power struggles. The Church is not a throne. The diaspora is not a lever to be pulled against the Armenian voter. A Church carried by its people must carry them back. A state liberated from corruption must be defended—not weakened—by Armenians everywhere”. Garo H. Armen, PhD Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Agenus Inc.; Founder and Chairman, Children of Armenia Fund (COAF)

”

Honors

In 2002, Ernst & Young recognized him as the NYC Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year.

In 2004, Armen became a recipient of the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his humanitarian efforts in Armenia as well as his exceptional contributions to American society.

In 2007 he was awarded the Honorary Medal by the Prime Minister of Armenia.

He is also the recipient of the Golden Medal, awarded by the Armavir provincial governor for his investments in the region.

In 2013 Dr. Garo Armen has been awarded the Mkhitar Heratsi Medal by the President of Armenia.

External links

• https://agenusbio.com/team/ - Agenus Official Website
• https://www.coaf.org/en/story/ - COAF Official Website