Julia Owens

A clot, a clock, and a way to buy back time

Stroke care has always run on a stopwatch. The drugs that dissolve clots also thin the blood, so doctors face a brutal trade: break up the blockage in the brain, or keep the patient from bleeding out somewhere else. Once the medicine is in, there is no taking it back. Julia C. Owens took the top job at Basking Biosciences in October 2025 to change exactly that.

Basking's lead candidate, BB-031, is an RNA aptamer - a short, folded strand of genetic material engineered to grab onto von Willebrand Factor, a protein that helps clots form and hold. Choke that protein and the clot loosens, restoring blood flow to the brain. The twist is the second molecule in the pair: BB-025, a direct-acting reversal agent. If a patient starts to bleed or needs surgery, the reversal agent neutralizes the therapy fast. A thrombolytic with an off switch. That is the bet Owens signed up to place.

She arrived mid-stride. The same week she was named CEO, Basking dosed its first patients in Part B of the Phase 2 RAISE trial and unlocked a $27.5 million tranche from the $55 million round ARCH Venture Partners led back in January 2024. Richard Shea, who founded the company and ran it from 2019, stepped into the President and COO seat. Owens calls the science the draw: the company's "unparalleled dedication to the stroke community," and a chance "to realize the potential of BB-031 to reshape stroke care."

She has built the airplane before

This is not Owens's first company from scratch. In 2012 she co-founded Millendo Therapeutics and ran it as President and CEO for the better part of a decade. Under her, Millendo pulled $200 million out of both private and public markets, pushed four separate drug candidates into clinical studies - one all the way to a pivotal trial - and went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker MLND. The diseases were the hard kind: rare endocrine disorders, including a treatment aimed at Prader-Willi syndrome.

Before Millendo she had logged the unglamorous, essential work of business development and corporate strategy at Lycera, QuatRx Pharmaceuticals, and Tularik. Her specialty became the connective tissue of biotech: partnerships, deals, mergers, the negotiations that decide whether a promising molecule ever reaches a patient. After Millendo she led Ananke Therapeutics and founded the early-stage discovery company Verto Therapeutics. She knows how the machine is assembled because she has assembled it more than once.

The square peg who stopped apologizing

Owens did not always get to lead as herself. She remembers walking into the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference - the industry's annual gravitational center - in a black pantsuit, deliberately blending into the blue-gray uniform of the men around her. Pink was out. Talking about your kids was out. "We were all square pegs trying to be forced into a circle," she says of those early years.

That memory turned into a mission. In 2022 Owens and a handful of women in the corner office started meeting informally to compare notes on running biopharma companies. It snowballed - her word - into the Biotech CEO Sisterhood, now a 501(c)3 nonprofit with a brand, a media presence, and a pointed philosophy: sponsorship over mentorship. Mentors give advice; sponsors put your name in the room when you are not there. The Sisterhood pushes women up, not just along.

Her conviction is plain. "Women can have highly fulfilling careers and have highly fulfilling lives, and those can intersect." And on what the group actually does: "Our community is helping provide the confidence and the encouragement for a lot of women to step up." She backs that with capital and access, too - she advises GV, Google's venture arm, with a focus on women's health, and chairs Sena Therapeutics, a women's health company.