Terry DavidIn biotech, the pressure comes early and often. Scientific risk, regulatory scrutiny, capital expectations, and public visibility converge—often in ways that push founders to compromise, recalibrate, or burn out entirely. Leen Kawas, CEO of EIT Pharma and co-founder of Propel Bio Partners, knows this landscape intimately. She’s led companies through IPOs, clinical pivots, board transitions, and investor scrutiny. Through it all, one principle has remained constant: purpose first.
Kawas isn’t just an operator. She’s a scientist by training, an inventor by background, and an investor by experience. Her rise in the biotech industry came with high stakes: at Athira Pharma, which she co-founded and led, she guided the company from a research-stage startup to a publicly listed firm with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases. The company raised over $400 million under her leadership—an achievement that placed her among the very few women in the U.S. biotech sector to take a company public as a founder.
But Kawas’s career has not been defined solely by milestones. It has been shaped by how she navigated inflection points. In moments of pressure—whether from market dynamics, boardroom tensions, or personal scrutiny—she returned again and again to a core question: Why are we doing this? That question has helped her filter signal from noise, make difficult trade-offs, and stay grounded in a field that often rewards velocity over clarity.
Staying true to purpose, in Leen Kawas’s view, is not about resisting change. It’s about having an internal compass strong enough to guide adaptation. In the early days of Athira, that meant holding firm on a therapeutic focus that many investors initially viewed as too ambitious. Neurodegeneration is a notoriously difficult category—slow enrollment, expensive trials, and a long history of late-stage failure. But Kawas believed in the science, and more importantly, in the unmet need. Patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s were underserved. If no one else was going to move the science forward, she felt it was worth trying.
That conviction didn’t mean ignoring commercial viability. Kawas has always been attentive to investor alignment, market positioning, and regulatory strategy. But she doesn’t treat business imperatives as a replacement for scientific mission. In her model, they work in tandem—each strengthening the other. When pressure mounts, she believes, that dual grounding in purpose and pragmatism becomes a leadership asset.
Now at the helm of EIT Pharma and managing Propel Bio Partners, Kawas is building a new generation of companies that share this ethos. Through her venture fund, she supports founders who are not only technically skilled but also mission-driven. She looks for entrepreneurs who understand the human stakes of their science, and who are willing to make the hard choices that come with staying true to it.
Kawas has also been candid about the cost of leadership—especially for underrepresented founders. As a woman in biotech, she has often been the only one in the room. The visibility can be empowering, but also isolating. Public scrutiny, especially during periods of transition, can distort narratives. In response, she has leaned on transparency and mentorship—not to explain herself, but to make space for others. She sees it as part of her role to widen the path, not just walk it.
One way she protects her sense of purpose is by maintaining proximity to patients and caregivers. For Kawas, biotech isn’t just a financial ecosystem. It’s a human one. Every platform, every pipeline, every protocol traces back to a person waiting for something better. That connection isn’t sentimental. It’s strategic. It keeps teams aligned. It informs clinical design. It helps founders resist the temptation to chase fast exits or easy applause.
Kawas also brings this clarity to her board roles, including at Inherent Biosciences, where she helps steer a company working on epigenetic diagnostics for conditions like male infertility. Even in a complex and rapidly evolving field, she pushes for purpose-driven metrics: How does this work expand access? Where does it shift the standard of care? What barriers will patients still face even if the science succeeds?
In every role she plays—scientist, CEO, investor, mentor—Kawas builds around intention. She encourages founders to articulate their “why” early, not just for pitch decks, but for internal alignment. Purpose, in her model, isn’t a soft value. It’s a strategic filter. It helps teams decide which opportunities to pursue, which investors to partner with, and when to say no.
That kind of clarity isn’t easy to maintain in a field as complex and capital-intensive as biotech. But for Kawas, it’s precisely what makes the work sustainable. When founders are connected to purpose, they don’t just endure pressure. They lead through it. They build companies that stay focused, science that stays relevant, and cultures that attract people for the long term.
In a sector that often celebrates speed and scale, Leen Kawas offers a quieter model: thoughtful growth, mission-aligned leadership, and a long view rooted in service. Pressure, she believes, is inevitable. But purpose? That’s a choice. And when chosen deliberately, it becomes the most durable force of all.
Learn more about Leen Kawas in her Crunchbase profile: