Women Speak
Four women at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference described the “culture shock” they felt when changing from large pharmaceutical companies to small biotech companies and from senior roles to CEO, as reported by Amirah Al Idrus in Fierce Biotech.
Dr. Aoife Brennan made the transition from Biogen to Synlogic easily, but found it more difficult to move from chief medical officer to CEO role at the synthetic biology company. She explained, “As a chief medical officer, I wasn’t a domain expert, but I knew if the regulatory person got sick, I could run [that unit] … I was comfortable, kind of. When I stepped up to CEO, I thought, ‘I don’t know anything about finance — I’m not an accountant! I don’t know about manufacturing.’ It creates a sense of anxiety not to be a domain expert in everything I’m accountable for as CEO.”
Brennan had expected that she would serve in other high-level capacities before becoming CEO, but the board asked her to take the job before that happened. Starting the job on an interim basis, she eased into it over a one-year period.
Athena Countouriotis, M.D., CEO of kinase inhibitor player Turning Point Therapeutics was also her company’s chief medical officer before becoming CEO. Previously the CMO at Adverum Biotechnologies, Halozyme and Ambit Biosciences, she guided one through its IPO and worked with CEOs.
According to Countouriotis, “I had been a public officer as a CMO across multiple companies for many years and worked for multiple CEOs. I saw enough of the role to appreciate it was something I thought I could do, making sure I had the right support. I don’t see it as very different, really. I had always been externally facing as a CMO — I was speaking at J.P. Morgan every year.”
Leaving big pharma for biotech was a bigger transition. As Countouriotis said, “I had led large organizations as a team leader, but I had so many resources around me and now, I was at a 40-person private company navigating all the things I had to do. Ambit was very similar to what Turning Point looked like when I came. But we didn’t have the pipeline depth we have here, for sure.”
Pearl Huang, Ph.D., who had worked for Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche, became CEO of Cygnal Therapeutics in 2019. She said that it was a smooth transition.
“A CEO is there to create culture,” Huang said. “It was irresistible to get to create a culture that not only you will thrive in, but also the people you attract. If you’ve seen a situation where you might have done something differently as a leader, this is your opportunity to do it right — so go do it.”
Patricia Hurter, Ph.D., came to Lyndra Therapeutics and found that it was 50% women with 50% of of the leadership and board being women and the previous CEO being a woman. She spent the previous 15 years of her career at Vertex, which gradually became more diverse. According to Hunter, “I didn’t have to do anything. I just walked in and that was the way it was. It’s something I’ll work to make sure we maintain. It was refreshing for me.”
