Angèle Maki

Antibodies do not sell themselves. Someone has to sit at the table between the lab and the boardroom, fluent in both, and decide what a molecule is worth before anyone knows whether it works. For two decades that someone has often been Angèle Maki.

Her newest table is at Ability Biotherapeutics, a company splitting its address between Montreal and the AI-antibody frontier. In December 2025 it named Maki its first Chief Business Officer. The job is exactly what it sounds like and harder than it sounds: lead the business development strategy, drive global partnering, and find the investors willing to back a platform that designs antibodies with a computer.

What makes the appointment quietly remarkable is the speed. She joined Ability's board as an independent director in June 2025. By December she had moved from advising the company to running its dealmaking. Six months from the boardroom to the corner office is not a slow courtship.

The product she is selling has a name - AbiLeap - and an unusual pitch. It pairs generative AI with one of the largest exclusively-held, therapeutically relevant human antibody databases, then runs that AI through in vitro display and screening to build fully human antibodies that switch on only where you want them. Logic-gated, in the company's words: contextual selectivity, so the drug acts at the disease site and stays quiet everywhere else. For cancer and autoimmune disease, that selectivity is the whole game.

It is a science story, but Maki's job is the sentence after the science. A platform that can generate antibodies is a promise. A platform with signed partners and funded programs is a company. She is the translator who turns one into the other - the part of biotech that rarely makes the press release headline and almost always decides the outcome.

She arrives with a network rather than a learning curve. Ability's CEO, Giles Day, framed the hire around exactly that: her deep expertise in deal-making, licensing and strategic partnerships, together with a broad biotech and pharma background and an extensive global network. In a field where a single introduction can reroute a company's future, the address book is the asset.

The training was pure bench science. A B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Winnipeg in Canada. A Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from Stanford. Postdoctoral work in molecular biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, the kind of pedigree that usually ends in a lab coat and a grant cycle.

She took the other door. Instead of running experiments, she went to the side of biotech that decides which experiments get funded, partnered and bought. The chemistry never left - it just became the thing she could read fluently while everyone else needed a translator.

The career that followed is almost a map of where antibodies became medicine. Medarex, the antibody pioneer later folded into Bristol Myers Squibb. Genentech, the original biotech. A turn at 23andMe. Merck. Then Eli Lilly, where she ran venture science inside corporate business development - the place where big pharma goes hunting for the science it does not yet own.

In 2021 she became Senior Vice President of Business Development at ReCode Therapeutics, a genetic-medicines company. Then Chief Business Officer at Callio Therapeutics, the multi-payload antibody-drug-conjugate company spun out of Hummingbird Bioscience. Each move kept the same throughline: find the science early, structure the deal, build the partnership.

There is a pattern in that resume worth naming. She has sat on nearly every side of the biotech deal. The small company selling its breakthrough. The pharma giant buying it. The venture arm scouting it. Few people in the room have seen the transaction from all three chairs. At Ability, that range is the point.

The chemistry degree was Canadian, and so, it turns out, is the cause she carries. Maki chairs the board of Canadian Entrepreneurs in Life Sciences, a non-profit built to support the next generation of leaders in the sector. It is the kind of role that pays nothing and signals everything: a working executive spending her scarcest resource - time - on the people coming up behind her.

There is a tidy symmetry to it. She left Winnipeg for Stanford and Scripps and never really came back to the bench. But the part of her that is unmistakably Canadian shows up in the volunteering, in the championing of homegrown founders, in the insistence that an emerging sector needs more than capital. It needs people who have already crossed the bridge willing to wave the next ones across.

Ability's leadership headed to the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2026, biotech's annual gravitational center, where careers and partnerships are made in hotel-lobby conversations. For a brand-new Chief Business Officer with a two-decade address book, it is less a conference than a homecoming. The deals she is hired to find tend to start exactly there.

Ability raised roughly $30 million on its way here, with a seed round and an $18 million infusion in mid-2024. That is enough money to build a platform. It is not enough to build a pipeline of approved drugs without help. Which is precisely why the CBO hire matters more than the title suggests.

A company like Ability survives by partnering - licensing its antibodies to larger players, co-developing programs, attracting the next round of investors who believe AI can design better medicines than trial and error. Every one of those moves is a negotiation. Maki is the negotiator. The science decides whether the molecules work; the dealmaking decides whether the company lives long enough to find out.

She has, by the count of the public record, helped move assets from research bench to clinic across nearly twenty years and a roster of companies most people in the industry would recognize on sight. The pattern is the pitch. Ability is not betting that Angèle Maki will learn how to sell antibodies. It is betting she already knows.

It is a strange, specific kind of expertise - not inventing the medicine, not prescribing it, but standing in the gap where a discovery becomes a business. Most people never see that gap. Maki has spent a career living inside it, and at Ability she has been handed the keys to it. The headline says Chief Business Officer. The job is closer to chief translator between what is possible in a lab and what is fundable in a boardroom.