A company sale makes a splendid ending. It supplies a date, a buyer and a number large enough to dominate the telling. Catherine J. Pearce’s story becomes more interesting just after that point. In February 2023, AstraZeneca completed its acquisition of CinCor Pharma, where she had been a co-founder and chief operating officer. By April 2024, she had founded AllRock Bio. The next chapter required the familiar act of making a company exist.
There were colleagues to bring together, investors to persuade and another organization to shape. Pearce had already helped build several businesses. Experience gave her material to work with; it could hardly fill the next calendar for her. Anyone who has ever started something will recognize the distinction. An impressive biography can get you into the meeting. Eventually, someone still has to decide what happens on Monday.
Now AllRock’s CEO and founder, Pearce has spent more than 25 years in biotechnology and related businesses. Her public career runs through large employers, an incubator, a publicly traded company and fresh startups. Cincinnati appears throughout. So does an interest in how people work together, particularly when the organization is small enough that everybody’s contribution is visible.
The long way back to the beginning
Pearce’s first job after university was in sales at Roche. Later came Merck, Medpace and Teva. She crossed several sides of the same industry before taking on the task of founding companies. There is an appealing circularity to the Roche connection: CinCor would later license an asset from the company where her working life had begun. Careers occasionally arrange a callback without consulting a screenwriter.
Her formal education developed over time, too. She graduated from Xavier University with a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1997. In 2004, she earned an MBA at the same university. A doctorate from Nova Southeastern University followed in 2017. Science, business and further research sit alongside one another in her academic record, acquired across two decades rather than collected before the first job.
That chronology matters because it resists the tidy origin story in which a founder understands the destination from the first day. Pearce’s qualifications accumulated as her career changed. A biology degree and an MBA ask different questions of the world. One concerns the subject being studied; the other introduces the organization, its resources and the choices that keep it running.
By the time she became a founder, she had worked inside organizations with different responsibilities and scales. Her later career would bring those perspectives into a much smaller setting. There is a particular kind of education in moving from a department within a large business to a company where the department may be a single colleague.
A Cincinnati company, with room to grow
In 2015, Pearce co-founded CinRx with Jon Isaacsohn. Their plan centered on licensing assets and putting them into focused companies. Pearce helped build six portfolio businesses, including CinCor. The structure gave company formation a repeatable shape: a parent organization, distinct businesses and people concentrating on the work in front of them.
Cincinnati was the chosen base for CinRx. For Pearce, the city already contained years of education and professional relationships. Founding there placed the next stage of her career within an existing network. The company could draw on international experience while remaining connected to a place she knew.
Six portfolio companies also make the word “founder” less singular than it first sounds. Each business needs its own decisions, responsibilities and financing. The job involves repeatedly turning a proposal into an organization capable of acting on it. A name on an incorporation document is a beginning; an operating team is a considerably longer assignment.
Pearce’s career at CinRx helps explain her present title. She has worked as an operator as well as a founder, concerned with the machinery that makes plans executable. The distinction is useful when reading an executive biography. Founding records who helped start the business. Operating describes the continuing obligation to make its parts work together.
What $1.8 billion actually means
CinCor’s acquisition closed on February 24, 2023. AstraZeneca paid approximately $1.3 billion upfront. Additional contingent consideration could bring the transaction’s value to approximately $1.8 billion. The larger figure belongs with the words “up to.” Those two words do a fair amount of accounting.
Shareholders were entitled to $26 per share in cash and a contingent value right representing a possible further $10 per share, subject to the agreement’s milestone conditions. CinCor’s public listing would end following the acquisition. The company had moved from formation to the public market and then into a larger owner’s organization.
Pearce created and led CinCor’s clinical-stage function through that period. Her contribution was part of a collective company-building effort, involving colleagues with different responsibilities. The acquisition establishes an outcome for that company and that transaction. The next venture would need to establish its own.
Read that way, the sale becomes a hinge in her biography. Before it sits the work of building CinCor; after it comes another period of formation. The financial number is concrete and consequential. So is the decision to begin again when a finished chapter might have offered an entirely respectable place to stop.
The next company keeps some familiar faces
JucaBio followed CinCor. Pearce co-founded the business with Justin Thompson, another former CinCor executive. By January 2025, JucaBio had raised $3.8 million in new equity, according to reporting on its securities filing. An August 2024 interview had already introduced Pearce as its CEO and co-founder, discussing small, flexible organizational units.
AllRock became JucaBio’s first portfolio company. Its official biography dates Pearce’s founding of AllRock to April 2024. Thompson is its co-founder and chief business officer. Their shared history carries across the company names, giving the new enterprise a relationship that predates its own arrival.
On September 16, 2025, AllRock announced a $50 million Series A, co-led by Versant Ventures and Westlake BioPartners. The announcement explicitly connected the leadership team to CinCor. Westlake’s David Allison welcomed the opportunity to work with the team again. Pearce’s experience had become legible to investors through work they already knew.
There is a quiet human detail inside that institutional language. A returning collaborator remembers more than a job title. They have seen how a person handles questions, deadlines and disagreements. A new company still faces uncertainty, but its colleagues need not begin as strangers. Familiarity supplies a starting point for the practical business of trusting someone else’s judgment.
An office lease is a curious measure of ambition
In June 2026, Pearce discussed an industry seeking flexibility in both workspace and employment. She described companies looking for collaborative environments without long lease commitments. Preserving cash mattered more than acquiring premises. A handsome office has many virtues; paying for it indefinitely is a separate question.
She also pointed to the appeal of keeping established teams together. Colleagues may value the chance to continue working with one another. Employers can benefit from complementary skills and working relationships that already function. Flexibility, in her account, can help recruitment when a startup cannot compete entirely on salary.
That view fits the continuity visible at AllRock. Pearce’s attention returns to the organization as a working arrangement: who is involved, what they need and how a business can afford to keep going. Her hopes for an improving IPO market likewise concerned the practical consequences for companies seeking more financing options.
Fundraising also requires a way of handling the answer nobody wants. During a 2026 leadership broadcast with Tanya Bos and Emma Tinsley, Pearce described tracking investor rejections. Recording them made repeated refusal part of the work. It is a revealing anecdote for a founder whose career can otherwise be reduced to a few successful announcements.
“The true test of leadership is how are you going to respond.”
Catherine J. Pearce · 2026
Her emphasis in that discussion was on managing her own reaction and continuing with the next difficult task. A rejection belongs in the record, alongside the next conversation. The public announcement arrives on one day. The founder has to find a workable response on all the others.
The city she keeps coming back to
Xavier reappears in Pearce’s story as an institution she serves. She joined its President’s Advisory Council in 2020. In 2022, the university appointed her to its Board of Trustees, with a three-year term beginning that July. She returned to a place where she had once been a student, now with responsibilities for its direction.
The university recognized her with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2024. Its account also described her mentoring students and professionals, alongside service on private company boards and advisory committees. Her working life includes helping other people think about their own next steps.
Another Cincinnati connection surfaced publicly in 2026 when Pearce supported the FC Cincinnati Foundation. She recalled relying on local support to take part in athletics while growing up in the city, and spoke about the confidence and learning that team sports can provide. The memory gives her interest in teams a setting beyond the workplace.
Pearce’s career has moved through companies with different owners, structures and ambitions. The recurring details are easier to picture: another degree, a familiar colleague, a return to campus, support for children hoping to play. AllRock is her current company-building chapter. Cincinnati remains a place where the story has people waiting in it.