Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Top women in biopharma 2015

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

LPBI

 

Top women in biopharma 2015
http://www.fiercebiotech.com/special-reports/top-women-biotech-2015

 

This year’s fiercest women in biopharma are seemingly doing it all.

Pioneering a fully integrated biotech in China? Check. Leading aging research at Google’s mysterious new life sciences upstart? Check. Changing the game for biotech innovators? Running the world’s largest consumer health player? Blazing the off-P&L financing trail? Check, check, check.

But while at times our 12 honorees have made it look easy, it hasn’t necessarily been that way. Biopharma is still a world dominated by men, which, according to Kleiner Perkins‘ Beth Seidenberg, means women “need to be the champions.”

“It’s a 50-50 world, but we see that 15% of founders or CEOs are women. Only 15% in the 50% that are women have good ideas? Come on,” she says.

Sometimes, though–as several of the women on this list know–being the champions means more than just leading by example, and they’re doing their parts to help others to the same levels of success through recruiting, volunteering and mentoring.

“Leadership is about creating futures that are not a direct path,” says the Broad Institute‘s Samantha Singer. “It’s about being courageous and being willing to speak about and talk about futures that aren’t obvious to other people. Take a stand for a future you can see, one you know can happen even when you can’t see how.”

As for the future we can see? It’s one that includes putting those they’ve inspired on this list sometime soon. — Carly Helfand (email | Twitter)

Revisit our previous Women in Biopharma features: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

 

Belén Garijo
From bedside to boardroom

Company: Merck KGaA
Title: CEO of Merck Healthcare

A doctor who entered the Spanish workforce among an oversupply of medical graduates, Belén Garijo practiced medicine for 6 years before joining the pharma industry. There was a “very high output of physicians that couldn’t get jobs easily,” she toldThe Wall Street Journal in a 2014 interview. So, she looked for other avenues to continue helping patients.

“I saw [pharmaceuticals] as an opportunity to continue to develop myself and serve the patients from a different place,” she told the newspaper.

But while the capacity in which she serves patients has changed, her fundamental approach has not. Her experience as a physician has influenced her management style, as CEO first of Merck Serono, and beginning in January this year, CEO of Merck Healthcare.

“I look at the business as I used to look at my patients. I recognize the symptoms. I go to the root cause to treat my business,” Garijo said.

She started out as medical director at Abbott’s ($ABT) Spanish affiliate and then moved to Abbott headquarters in Illinois as director of international medical affairs. In 1996, she joined Rhône-Poulenc Rorer in Spain as director of the oncology business unit. Following Rhône-Poulenc’s merger with Hoechst AG to form Aventis, Garijo then served as global vice president of oncology for the new company in New Jersey.

2003 saw her return to Spain, where she became the general manager of Sanofi-Aventis and led the merger in 2004. From there, she moved on to Paris, trading in Spain for all of Europe as she became Sanofi’s ($SNY) senior vice president of global operations Europe. Garijo oversaw Sanofi’s acquisition of Genzyme as its global integration leader.

In 2011, Garijo joined Merck KGaA as chief operating officer, before rising to president and CEO in less than three years. And barely a year later, she was named CEO of Merck Healthcare, which encompasses its biopharma, consumer health, allergopharma and biosimilars divisions.

When it comes to developing managerial expertise, Garijo brushes aside the idea of a “magic recipe.”

“I learned by making mistakes. I learned by taking risks. I learned by consulting with others. I don’t think it’s a magic recipe, but you know, just being aware of what do you do well and what can you do better?” she told the WSJ. “I think self-awareness is actually something that’s super important. You have to be very self-confident because you have to give this confidence to others every day.

 

Kristen Hege
Complacency is not an option

Company: Celgene
Title: VP of Translational Development, Hematology/Oncology

For Dr. Kristen Hege, Celgene’s ($CELG) San Francisco site lead, the decision to enter the field of biotech and medicine was born of her familial history and a passion for drug discovery. Throughout her career, that passion–in addition to her optimism–has allowed her to navigate the field successfully in spite of challenges along the way.

Hege lost her parents–both physicians–by the age of 20, and her brother in the 1990s AIDS epidemic. The loss of her parents–she thinks of her mother as a “pioneer” in her field–taught Hege to be pragmatic and have a “deep appreciation for good health.” Later in life, she served as her brother’s primary caregiver until his death just one year before effective AIDS meds hit the market.

“That had significant impact on me and how much time matters when you are talking about new drug development,” she told FierceBiotech. “The difference of a year or two in delivery of these significant new drugs to the patient really does matter. Complacency is not an option in this world when there are these real lives that are cut short because they happen to not have a drug approved at that moment in time.”

Hege completed her MD at the University of California, San Francisco, and her residency in internal medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, afterward returning to the Bay Area for her fellowship in hematology and oncology at UCSF. It was during the ’90s, though, that she began to notice a lot of innovation in the biotech sector.

After talking about her interests with her program’s visiting doctor, Stephen Sherwin, the two agreed “basically on a handshake” that she could complete her two years of fellowship research at Sherwin’s biotech, Cell Genesys, Hege explained, a move that would end up sparking her fascination with the industry side of things. Six months after returning to UCSF for the academic career she’d always imagined, she had an epiphany, realizing she was more excited about the company’s technology. It wasn’t long before she ended up at the company where she’d spend 14 years, though she never gave up her UCSF appointment.

 

Cynthia Kenyon
Continuing her life’s work on aging with the power of Google

Company: Calico (Google)
Title: Vice President of Aging Research

Google’s ($GOOG) Calico has kept very quiet in most respects, shrouding its research and business prospects in a blanket of generalities about aging and longevity. What has generated the most excitement, however, is the crack team Calico has assembled over the past couple of years, including one of the foremost experts on aging from the University of California in San Francisco: Cynthia Kenyon.

Kenyon, a renowned geneticist, left UCSF last year for Calico after advising the startup in its first few months, though she has also remained an emeritus professor at the school. She serves as the vice president of aging research at the Google-owned company, joining CEO Art Levinson and R&D chief Hal Barron, in a who’s who of biotech insiders.

At UCSF, Kenyon gained notoriety for decades of work on aging in roundworms, for which her genetic modifications could effectively double the lifespan. Her first foray into clinical therapies was the co-founding of Elixir Pharmaceuticals in 1999, which closed a few years ago after a Novartis ($NVS) buyout fizzled due to cash concerns during the economic recession. And that’s where Google’s deep pockets will likely allow Kenyon and the rest of the team at Calico to reverse course and take their work to the next level.

 

Samantha Singer
Forging a nontraditional path

Company: The Broad Institute
Title: Chief Operating Officer

Samantha Singer’s journey toward becoming chief operating officer at the Broad Institute has followed a unique trajectory. Singer joined the institute in April 2014 after a long tenure at Biogen ($BIIB) and worked in healthcare and biomedical consulting at different points in her career.

“I wanted to follow my interests and passions,” Singer told FierceBiotech. “Because I haven’t had a path that is based on specific expertise, I haven’t had a series of opportunities that someone can map out. It’s not an obstacle or a challenge, but it’s something that has made it more challenging than for someone with a functional expertise.”

Before jumping into the biotech industry, Singer started a PhD program in molecular biology at Rockefeller University. But “working at the lab bench wasn’t for me,” she said, and she decided to complete a master’s degree instead.

From there, Singer started working in management consulting. She concentrated mostly on the research side of things at the global management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group, but found herself acting as a translator between the research and business departments. The experience prompted Singer to get an MBA from Harvard University. “I wanted to think through what strategy and business looked like,” she said.

Singer then decided to pursue an entrepreneurial partnership, which led to her first encounter with her now-employer, she said. Along with her business partner at the time, Singer wrote the Broad’s initial business plan, setting the wheels in motion for not only the institute but also her next career move. “I got really interested less in strategy but in how you execute the strategy. How do you help people execute against a vision you have?” she said.

Soon thereafter, Singer started working for Biogen in the company’s Organization Effectiveness group. During her 7 years at Biogen she led the biotech’s Supply Chain operations for new product launches and also served as chief of staff for CEO George Scangos.

Since joining the Broad a year and a half ago as COO, Singer has worked with different teams to refine the organization’s vision and to make it more effective, she said. In the past year alone, the Broad has inked deals with key biopharma and med tech players, lending its expertise to companies’ R&D initiatives. In March, Bayer said it would use the Broad’s genomic analysis expertise to find new therapies for cardiovascular diseases. In June, the institute announced it would partner with tech titan Google ($GOOG) on a Big Data initiative.

“We have these technological platforms, leading edge organizations that do technological development and we work with scientists across the institute to execute broad ambitions they have. We’re looking ahead over the next 10 years, asking, how do we do that?” Singer said.