In biotech, the story people tell about entrepreneurship is usually about the moment the bell rings. The more consequential work happens earlier, in quieter rooms, when a scientist has to decide which uncertainty is worth carrying and which will sink the entire ship.
Leen Kawas built her career around that distinction. She is the CEO of EIT Pharma, serves on the board of Inherent Biosciences, and co-founded Propel Bio Partners, a venture fund focused on life science innovation. Before that, she co-founded Athira Pharma, led late-stage clinical programs, and guided the company through an initial public offering in September 2020, with reporting at the time noting a $204 million IPO raise. Propel Bio Partners’ biography of Kawas summarizes the larger financing arc as raising over $400 million around the public debut.
Kawas has described the milestone in a way that puts it in perspective. In a public profile tied to a clinical research podcast, she is presented as one of only 22 female founders in the US to take a company public. That statistic is striking, yet the more useful question is what the statistic hides: the operational habits required to get there.
Treat fundraising as a clinical process, not a popularity contest
Fundraising in biotech can look like persuasion, and some of it is. The best version looks like medicine. You gather evidence, you document uncertainty, you make a case for why the next experiment is justified, and you decide what you can responsibly promise.
Kawas’ background is unusually aligned with this discipline. Propel Bio Partners describes her as an inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur who advanced multiple late-stage programs and navigated the company to the public markets. The lesson is not that confidence sells. The lesson is that clarity sells. Investors can tolerate risk. They struggle with vagueness.
Build a company that can survive your optimism
Founders are rewarded for conviction. Public markets punish unstructured conviction.
Taking a company public is a forced maturation. Governance becomes more formal, reporting becomes less forgiving, and timelines become visible to the world. In the GeekWire coverage of Athira’s IPO, the milestone is described as the culmination of years of development, with the IPO itself treated as a major financing step toward advancing clinical programs.
The operational lesson here is that going public works best when it is a reflection of readiness, not a cure for lack of readiness. The systems that hold a public company up, including finance, legal, regulatory planning, and communication rhythms, need to exist before the spotlight arrives.
Learn to speak in two languages without losing the science
One of the hardest transitions for scientist-founders is translation. The lab demands precision. The market demands narrative. If you distort one for the other, you lose credibility in one world and eventually in both.
Kawas’ later work as an investor underscores this translation skill. Inherent Biosciences describes her value to the board in terms of drug discovery, clinical trial methodology, regulatory strategy, commercialization, and financing. That list reads like a bridge between domains. It suggests a philosophy: keep the science intact, then translate what matters into decisions that funders and operators can act on.
Build the team like you are building a protocol
A clinical protocol is a sequence of actions designed to reduce avoidable error. Teams can be built the same way.
Leen Kawas’ current work spans operating roles and capital roles. EIT Pharma lists her as CEO and presents her scientific and leadership credentials as part of the company’s executive team. Propel Bio Partners presents her as a managing general partner working to back life science innovation.
The lesson is that scale requires role clarity. As the company grows, “everyone does everything” turns into invisible failure. The founder who succeeds in public markets is the founder who replaces heroic flexibility with explicit ownership, measured timelines, and a culture that can repeat good decisions without constant supervision.
Choose a mission that stays stable when incentives change
Private companies can move quietly. Public companies are moved by outside forces, including news cycles and quarterly pressures. In biotech, that is especially dangerous because the work is slow and the outcomes are probabilistic.
Kawas’ career has consistently centered on advancing therapeutic programs and supporting life science innovation, as reflected in the way her roles are described across EIT Pharma, Propel Bio Partners, and Inherent Biosciences. The leadership lesson is that mission is not branding. It is a stabilizer. When incentives pull in different directions, mission helps leadership decide what stays true.
Use the milestone for what it is, then return to the work
The “one of only 22” framing can invite the wrong takeaway, as if the point is rarity. The better takeaway is repeatability.
The public offering is a tool. It funds development, expands visibility, and increases accountability. It does not replace the daily work of building evidence, managing programs, and maintaining operational discipline. Kawas’ shift into building a venture platform at Propel Bio Partners is consistent with that view of the ecosystem: progress happens when good science is paired with durable execution and well-structured capital.
If there is a single throughline in her story, it is this: the milestone matters because it buys time and capacity for the mission. Then you go back to the bench-level mindset, the one that asks what is knowable, what is next, and what will make the next decision more defensible.
Check out Kawas’ recent interview with Billion Success: