Terry DavidBiotechnology is unusual among industries in that the risk-reward equation is visible at every stage of the work. A drug candidate fails in a clinical trial and years of investment disappear. A regulatory submission succeeds and a therapy reaches patients who had no other option. The stakes are rarely abstract, which means the people who allocate capital into the sector cannot treat risk as a purely financial variable. Leen Kawas’s investment philosophy at Propel Bio Partners emerged from inhabiting both sides of that equation: as a scientist who co-invented a drug candidate, as a CEO who navigated late-stage clinical programmes and a public offering, and now as Managing General Partner of the fund, where she writes the checks and watches the founders she backs encounter the same pressures she once faced.
Leen Kawas‘s formative observation about risk in biotech is direct: most failures in the sector are not science failures. They are execution failures. Manufacturing delays that blow development timelines, regulatory strategies built reactively rather than proactively, clinical programmes designed without commercialisation in mind, capital that runs out before meaningful milestones are reached. None of these is a problem with the underlying biology. They are problems with how the science was organised, resourced, and managed. Kawas has made the case that investors who only evaluate scientific risk are missing the larger category of risk that actually kills companies.
What Changed After 2021
The post-2021 market correction made this argument harder to ignore. After venture capital investment in biotech peaked at around $39 billion in 2021, total funding had fallen to roughly $23 billion by 2023, a decline of nearly forty percent. Investor selectivity reached levels not seen in years. Companies that had raised capital on the strength of a platform technology and a promising preclinical story found themselves exposed when the market demanded proof-of-concept data and a clinical hypothesis grounded in evidence. Kawas has described the correction as a healthy recalibration that separated companies capable of executing from those that had substituted ambition for discipline.
Her response at Propel Bio Partners was to build execution capacity directly into the investment model. Capital alone, she has argued consistently, does not de-risk drug development. What keeps promising science alive through long funding cycles is operational expertise alongside the capital: experience with regulatory strategy, clinical trial design, manufacturing, and the network relationships that allow a company to move faster than its runway would otherwise permit. The appointment of healthcare technology veteran Laurie Heilmann as Venture Partner in 2026, bringing more than three decades of experience across clinical development, diagnostics, and medical devices, was a direct expression of that thesis — a thesis also outlined on her EIT Pharma biography.
The Accessibility Multiplier
Kawas has also refined the standard definition of reward in biotech. The industry tends to measure it in returns to investors and market capitalisation. Her version adds a third axis: whether the therapy actually reaches the patients who need it. A compound that achieves regulatory approval but is priced or distributed in ways that make it inaccessible to a large share of the target population is not, in her framework, a full success. She has described a breakthrough therapy that reaches only a fraction of the patients who need it as a proof of concept with limited impact rather than a genuine medical advance.
This position has concrete consequences for how she evaluates investments. Companies developing diagnostics or therapeutics that can function outside elite healthcare infrastructure score differently on her assessment than those whose commercial model depends on concentrated, high-income markets. EIT Pharma, where she serves as CEO and leads programmes targeting Hepatitis D and Acute Respiratory Infections, is the most direct expression of that standard applied operationally. These are conditions with significant unmet need in patient populations that have been underserved by the pharmaceutical industry’s conventional incentive structures. The risk-reward equation Leen Kawas applies there asks whether a successful outcome will actually change something for the people who need it to, as described here.
Surviving the Lows
Kawas has returned to one piece of early advice she received at the beginning of her career as a consistent thread in how she frames risk to founders she supports: biotech involves many highs and far more lows, and the founders who survive the lows are the ones who are very likely to succeed. The observation is empirical rather than motivational. The development timeline in biotech is long enough that almost every programme will encounter results that require reinterpretation, delays that require financial management, and moments when the logical path forward is unclear. Investors who understand that reality, and who build their support model around it rather than assuming clean linear progress toward an exit, are the ones whose portfolio companies have the best chance of converting their scientific promise into therapies that actually reach patients. That is the risk-reward equation Leen Kawas has spent her career learning to read accurately, as tracked on Crunchbase.