She trained to read the living brain as a psychiatrist. Now she builds the companies that try to fix it. CEO of Noema Pharma, co-founder of a biotech that sold for roughly a billion dollars, and a fixture of central-nervous-system medicine for more than two decades.
Ilise Lombardo runs Noema Pharma from a building on the Barfuesserplatz in Basel, the Swiss city where pharmaceutical history is measured in centuries. Noema is younger than that - founded in 2019, with compounds originally in-licensed from Roche - and it is chasing some of the most stubborn conditions in neurology and psychiatry. Lombardo took the CEO job in June 2023. She did not arrive as an outsider. She had been sitting on the company's board since 2021, watching the pipeline, before the board asked her to come run it.
The conditions on her desk are not the comfortable, crowded markets of modern biotech. They are the hard ones: tics that punctuate the lives of people with Tourette syndrome, the lightning-bolt facial pain of trigeminal neuralgia, seizures in tuberous sclerosis complex, and the central-nervous-system symptoms tied to menopause. Four programs, all in Phase 2, all approaching the moment where data either confirms the bet or unmakes it.
Conditions of the central nervous system have been my focus and passion for more than two decades. - Ilise Lombardo, on taking the helm at Noema
That sentence is not marketing. Lombardo's entire career reads like a single, deliberate sentence about the brain. Before she was a CEO, she was a psychiatrist who completed her residency at Columbia and then went deeper - two fellowships, one in neuroreceptor imaging and one in molecular genetics. One taught her to look at the living brain's chemistry. The other taught her to read the code underneath it. Most executives in her chair have an MBA and a spreadsheet. She has scans and genes.
She started where many physician-scientists start and few leave: academia. As an Assistant Professor of Clinical Research at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, she was on the research side of psychiatry. Then she crossed over into industry, and the crossing turned out to be permanent.
At Pfizer she led multi-therapeutic groups and development teams. At Forum Pharmaceuticals she was Vice President of Clinical Development and Medical Affairs. At Axovant Sciences she ran clinical research as Senior Vice President. Each role pulled her further from the clinic and closer to the machinery that turns a compound into an approved medicine - the trials, the regulators, the data packages that decide whether a drug lives.
I am thrilled to assume this leadership position with Noema Pharma at such a critical phase in the Company's growth. - Ilise Lombardo, June 2023
In 2019 she stopped working inside other people's companies and started one. Arvelle Therapeutics was her bet that Europe needed a focused CNS company built to launch. As co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, she helped turn it into exactly that - a launch-ready European business - and in 2021 Angelini Pharma bought it for roughly a billion dollars. The exit did two things. It validated her thesis that CNS, the unfashionable corner of biotech, could create real value. And it earned her a place on lists naming the top ten female company founders in the world.
Most people would treat a billion-dollar exit as a finish line. Lombardo treated it as a template. That same year, 2021, she became President of the Therapeutics Division at Kriya Therapeutics, a gene-therapy company, and joined Noema's board. By 2023 she had her own company to run again.
Noema's appeal, in Lombardo's telling, is the pipeline - "broad and unique," approaching "multiple clinical milestones." The company sits in the catalyst-rich, white-knuckle stretch of biotech where Phase 2 readouts arrive in clusters and each one can reprice the whole enterprise. Lombardo has been in that stretch before, on both sides of the table: as the chief medical officer who designs the trial and as the executive who has to explain the result. That is the rare combination Noema's board was buying.
Her chairman, Jeffrey Jonas, put it plainly when she was appointed: "Ilise has the expertise and experience to lead Noema as the Company enters its next phase of growth," adding that "her proven record of leadership in biotech combined with her extensive knowledge of CNS disease will be invaluable." Translation: they wanted a builder who also speaks fluent neuroscience, and those are not easy to find in the same person.
She has kept building the team around her. In early 2025 Noema brought on a new Chief Financial Officer, Michael Samar, as the company moved into a year defined by data. The hires tell you what Lombardo thinks the company needs - not visionaries, but operators who can carry programs across the finish line.
What makes Lombardo unusual is not the resume, impressive as it is. It is the consistency. Plenty of executives chase whatever therapeutic area is hot. She has spent more than 25 years on a single organ system, through clinical practice, academic research, large pharma and biotech. When she says CNS is her passion, the career is the evidence. The brain is not a phase for her. It is the whole point.
There is a quiet contrarian streak in that. CNS drug development has a reputation for breaking hearts - high failure rates, slippery endpoints, conditions that resist easy measurement. Lombardo has spent a career walking toward that difficulty rather than away from it, and once, at Arvelle, she made it pay. Noema is the rematch.
It is worth pausing on geography. Lombardo runs an American-led, Roche-rooted company from a city that has been making medicine since before the United States existed. Noema's registered home, 3 Barfuesserplatz, sits in the heart of Basel's old town, a few minutes from the headquarters of the giants. For a CNS company built on compounds in-licensed from Roche, the address is not an accident. It is a statement about where the talent, the science and the institutional memory of nervous-system drug development still live. Lombardo, an American physician who has now spent years operating in Europe - first building a European company at Arvelle, then leading one at Noema - has effectively bet her late career on the continent's biotech ecosystem.
The company she leads is still small by the standards of the firms she came up through. Where Pfizer counts employees in the tens of thousands, Noema counts them in the dozens. That is the deliberate trade of clinical-stage biotech: a tight team, a focused pipeline, and outcomes that hinge on a handful of trial readouts rather than a sprawling commercial portfolio. It is also a different kind of leadership. At a company this size, the CEO is not an abstraction at the top of a pyramid. She is close enough to the science to argue about endpoints and close enough to the cash to know exactly how many readouts the runway will cover.
Read end to end, Lombardo's career is a study in narrowing. She started broad - a medical degree from Yale, an M.Phil from Cambridge, an undergraduate degree from Brown, the kind of pedigree that could have pointed in any direction. Then she chose psychiatry, then she chose the nervous system, then she chose drug development, then she chose to build companies in that exact niche. Each decision closed off easier, more crowded paths and committed her further to a corner of medicine that most of biotech finds too risky. The billion-dollar Arvelle exit is the headline. The discipline behind it - 25 years of refusing to drift - is the real story.
None of which guarantees the next chapter. Phase 2 data is indifferent to credentials, and Tourette syndrome, trigeminal neuralgia, tuberous sclerosis and menopause-related CNS symptoms are hard precisely because so many others have tried and failed. But if there is a profile suited to that gamble, it looks a lot like a psychiatrist who has imaged the brain, sequenced its genes, run the trials, founded the company and sold it - and then chose to do the whole thing again. That is the wager Noema's board placed when it moved Ilise Lombardo from the boardroom to the corner office.
Faculty at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, after a psychiatry residency and fellowships in neuroreceptor imaging and molecular genetics.
Her first deep move into industrial drug development at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Forum Pharmaceuticals - a CNS-focused company - sharpened her focus on the nervous system.
Running clinical research at a high-profile neuroscience biotech.
Builds a launch-ready European CNS company from the ground up.
Joins Kriya Therapeutics as President of its Therapeutics Division and takes a board seat at Noema Pharma.
Steps off the board and into the corner office in Basel.
Targeting the tics that shape daily life for people living with Tourette syndrome.
Pain management for one of the most severe facial-pain conditions in medicine.
Working to control seizures in tuberous sclerosis complex.
Addressing vasomotor and CNS-mediated symptoms of menopause.
Her two Columbia fellowships were in neuroreceptor imaging and molecular genetics. She literally trained to look inside the living brain - and to read the code beneath it.
She has helped build CNS companies that big pharma wanted to buy. Arvelle's exit to Angelini landed near $1 billion.
She joined Noema as a board member, then got recruited from the board into the CEO's chair - a short walk most directors never make.
Noema's compounds trace back to Roche, the Basel giant down the road from Noema's own offices on the Barfuesserplatz.