women-in-biotech
(22)
Shehnaaz Suliman built a career by changing the scale of the problem
From Cape Flats protests to Oxford, Wall Street and the biotech boardroom, Suliman kept asking one question: how can one decision reach more people?
Deborah Bitterfield Is Taking the Water Out of Biologics - and the Waiting Room Out of the Day
A Duke materials scientist turned one stubborn laboratory technique into a biotech company, a Novartis collaboration, and a practical lesson in building around the minutes people want back.
Shelley Hartman Left Goldman Sachs to Bet on the Cell’s Tiny Messengers
After nineteen years in investment banking, Shelley Hartman traded advice for execution. At Aegle Therapeutics, she is turning an elegant piece of university science into a clinical-stage company, one painstaking milestone at a time.
Jessica Grossman Keeps Choosing the Harder, More Useful Company
The physician-turned-founder has spent two decades converting clinical frustration into companies, products and hard-won momentum. At IgGenix, her operating system is simple: keep the mission close, the team candid and the next milestone concrete.
Tara Nickerson
Tara Nickerson, PhD, is President, CEO and Director of Therini Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurological and retinal diseases. A biopharma executive with more than 20 years of experience, she was a founding-team member and Chief Business Officer at both Maze Therapeutics and Prothena Corporation before taking the top job at Therini in 2024. She combines a research background from McGill University with an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School and a long track record of company-building, financing and dealmaking in the life sciences.
Dominique Verhelle
Dominique Verhelle is a French-born scientist and biotech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads NextRNA Therapeutics, a Boston company building small-molecule drugs that target long non-coding RNA to treat cancers and neurological disorders. With a PhD in life sciences and an MBA in entrepreneurship, she has spent more than two decades across big pharma, venture capital, and startups - including Celgene, Pfizer, Third Rock Ventures, and Takeda - and helped launch Fulcrum Therapeutics and Cedilla Therapeutics before starting NextRNA. She is also an outspoken advocate for women founders in biotech.
Joan Shen
Joan Huaqiong Shen is the founder and CEO of NeuShen Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech with R&D centers in Shanghai and Boston that develops treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. A physician-scientist trained in psychiatry and neurology, she spent decades leading central-nervous-system drug programs at Eli Lilly, Wyeth, Pfizer, Hengrui and Johnson & Johnson before running R&D and serving as CEO at I-Mab Biopharma, where she took the company public on Nasdaq and struck a global partnership with AbbVie. In 2026 NeuShen closed a Series A+ round led by Lilly Asia Ventures as its lead compound NS-136 advanced into Phase 2 trials.
Joanne Smith-Farrell
Joanne Smith-Farrell is the President and CEO of Be Biopharma, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building a new class of medicines from engineered B cells - the body's own protein factories. A physicist by training who moved into drug development, she has spent more than 25 years leading teams tackling cancer and rare diseases, most notably building bluebird bio's 400-person oncology cell therapy business behind the CAR-T therapy Abecma. Since taking the helm at Be Bio in early 2021, she has steered the company through more than $350 million in funding as it works to turn B cells into durable, in vivo sources of therapeutic proteins.
Laura Katz
Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Fengru Lin
Fengru Lin is the co-founder and CEO of TurtleTree, a biotech company making dairy proteins without cows. A former Google account manager who took up cheesemaking as a hobby, she went hunting across Asia for clean raw milk, was horrified by what she found on the farms, and started a company to make milk in a lab instead. TurtleTree pivoted from full cell-cultured milk to precision fermentation, and now produces lactoferrin, a high-value milk protein once called 'pink gold,' using microbes instead of herds. She has raised roughly $44 million and made EDGE's 35 Under 35 and Her World's Young Woman Achiever lists.
Jessicca Rege
Jessicca M. Rege, Ph.D. is the Chief Executive Officer of Sus Clinicals, Inc., a biotech accelerating cancer drug development through the Oncopig Cancer Model, an FDA-cleared, genetically engineered pig platform for preclinical testing. A pharmaceutical scientist with more than 15 years in oncology R&D and global medical affairs, she previously served as Chief Development Officer at Mural Oncology, where she helped lead the company's public offering, and as VP, Head of Clinical Development, Oncology at Alkermes. She holds a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences with a focus on pharmacogenomics from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Li Sun
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Andrea Ashford-Hicks
Andrea Ashford-Hicks is the CEO of Cayuga Biotech, an early-stage platform biotechnology company developing biomimetic polyphosphate therapies for severe bleeding. She joined in 2022 after two decades in biopharma, including leading the FDA approval and commercial launch of RETHYMIC at Enzyvant Therapeutics and progressive roles at Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Agenus, EMD Serono and Schering-Plough. She holds dual degrees in biology and finance from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School.
Ashley Zehnder
Ashley Zehnder is the co-founder and CEO of Fauna Bio, a Berkeley biotech mining the genomes of hibernating ground squirrels, bears and 452 other mammal species for drugs that could treat humans. A boarded avian veterinarian with a Stanford PhD in cancer biology, she had her career epiphany while giving chemotherapy to a parrot, when a faculty member asked in disbelief, 'Birds... get cancer?' That question convinced her the wall between animal and human medicine was an illusion. Fauna Bio's Convergence AI platform turns the survival tricks of extreme mammals into therapeutic targets, work that has drawn partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and NASA-funded research into putting astronauts into a hibernation-like state.
Alice Zhang
Alice Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics (now Verge Labs), a San Francisco biotech she started in 2015 after walking away from an MD/PhD program at UCLA. She built a company that pairs machine learning with one of the largest collections of human brain tissue to find drug targets for diseases like ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. A Princeton molecular biology graduate, Soros Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Zhang turned her inexperience into what she calls a 'superpower,' raising more than $130 million and partnering with Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca before pivoting the company toward selling its data and insights to pharma in 2025.
Alla Zamarayeva
Alla Zamarayeva is the co-founder and CEO of CellFE, a Bay Area biotech building a non-viral, microfluidics-based platform for engineering human cells. A UC Berkeley engineering PhD and former Goldwater Scholar, she spun a piece of academic research she stumbled onto during her doctorate into a company aiming to make cell therapies cheaper, gentler, and eventually available at the point of care. In 2023 she led CellFE to a $22 million Series A backed by M Ventures, and she is steering the company toward redefining how gene-edited cell therapies are manufactured.
Catherine Sabatos-Peyton
Catherine Sabatos-Peyton is a cancer immunologist turned biotech CEO who runs Larkspur Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building small-molecule drugs that attack cancer's ability to hide from the immune system. As a Harvard PhD student she helped first describe TIM-3, now a major checkpoint protein; she later led discovery of the anti-TIM-3 antibody sabatolimab at CoStim and Novartis. In 2021 she stepped from the lab bench to the corner office, and now leads an all-female executive team whose lead drug, the PIP4K2C degrader LRK-4189, entered human trials in late 2025.
Cheri Ackerman Araromi
Cheri Ackerman Araromi is the cofounder and CEO of Concerto Biosciences, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that reads the social lives of microbes the way a producer reads a band. Using kChip, a droplet screening platform she helped build during her postdoc at the Broad Institute, Concerto tests how thousands of microbial combinations interact and assembles the winning ensembles into products for skin health, agriculture, and beyond. A Hertz Fellow with a Berkeley PhD in chemical biology, she frames the future of medicine as building healthy ecosystems rather than killing bad cells with toxins.
Helena Mancebo
Helena Mancebo is the founder and CEO of Multispan, Inc., a Hayward, California biotech she has run for more than 20 years. She built a company around G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) - still among the most prolific class of drug targets - and grew it into a maker of the industry's largest collection of highly characterized human GPCR cell lines and 1,600-plus assay tools. A Yale-trained immunologist and geneticist, she pairs hard cell biology with a service obsession: next-day assay turnaround, native receptor pharmacology, and a culture built on empathy, integrity, and productivity. In 2023 Multispan's cell engineering and assay services were folded into Avantor's catalog; in 2025 she partnered with AI-automation firm Synfini to push GPCR drug discovery forward.
Julia Owens
Julia C. Owens is a biopharmaceutical executive who in October 2025 became CEO of Basking Biosciences, a clinical-stage company building the first reversible thrombolytic therapy for acute ischemic stroke. With a UCSF Ph.D. and more than 25 years in the industry, she co-founded and ran Millendo Therapeutics for nearly a decade through its NASDAQ debut, later led Ananke Therapeutics, advises GV (Google Ventures) on women's health, chairs Sena Therapeutics, and co-founded the Biotech CEO Sisterhood to put more women in the corner office.
Damaris Skouras
Damaris Skouras is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Olatec Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company built around dapansutrile, an oral, specific NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitor she has pushed from the lab bench into Phase 2 trials spanning gout, melanoma, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. She started in finance as a Wall Street biotech banker in 1982, founded her own investment advisory firm in 1985, and eventually crossed the table to run the kind of company she used to finance. With a Stanford degree, a Harvard MBA, and the immunologist who discovered interleukin-1 as her co-founder, she has raised over $100 million to bet that a single inflammatory switch can be turned off across a range of diseases.
Sofia Touami
Sofia Touami, Ph.D., is the Chief Business Officer of Lycia Therapeutics, a South San Francisco biotech pioneering lysosomal targeting chimeras (LYTACs) - a platform invented by Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi to degrade disease-causing extracellular proteins. A trained organic chemist who earned her Ph.D. at Stanford and did postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute, Touami has built a career as one of biotech's sharpest dealmakers, having orchestrated major transactions including Frontier Medicines' landmark global collaboration with AbbVie before joining Lycia in July 2023. She helped close Lycia's oversubscribed $106.6 million Series C in May 2024, positioning the company to bring its LYTAC-based autoimmune therapies into clinical trials.