Leen Kawas made a decision when she was seven years old, as documented here, standing in her family home in Amman, Jordan, after her grandmother died of cancer. She decided she would spend her life developing drugs to fight disease. It is the kind of childhood vow that most people quietly revise as they encounter the complexity of what they initially imagined doing. Kawas did not revise it. She earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Jordan, immigrated to the United States in 2008 with less than a hundred dollars, completed a doctorate in molecular pharmacology at Washington State University, co-invented a novel drug candidate for Alzheimer’s disease, and built the company around it into a publicly listed biotechnology firm that raised more than four hundred million dollars. The vow held.
What animated that trajectory, from the first day of graduate school through the Athira Pharma IPO in 2020 and into her current work as CEO of EIT Pharma and managing general partner of Propel Bio Partners, is a conviction that research only fully justifies itself when it reaches a patient. That conviction is not unusual in biotech as a stated value. What distinguishes Kawas is the degree to which she has built operational systems around it rather than treating it as a guiding sentiment.
The Trial as a Patient Experience
During the Alzheimer’s clinical trials she ran at Athira, Kawas made a series of decisions that most trial designers would not have prioritised. She recognised that patient retention was one of the primary variables determining whether a trial produced usable data, and she examined what was actually causing patients and their caregivers to disengage. Some of the factors she identified were logistical rather than medical: the difficulty of arranging meals on trial days, the time burden placed on caregivers, the demographic distance between the patients being studied and the clinical staff managing the trial. She addressed each of these directly.
Onsite meals were arranged for patients and caregivers attending trial visits. Diverse hiring practices were applied to the clinical management team on the explicit theory that participants would be more comfortable engaging with staff who reflected their own backgrounds. Kawas (see leenkawas.com) has said that if clinical trials are designed to include the patient’s perspective, patient retention improves, and retention is one of the industry’s most persistent and costly problems. The insight is not radical. The execution is what distinguished it.
The Gap Between Discovery and Use
The argument of Leen Kawas on patient-centred drug development addresses the gap between scientific discovery and actual patient access as one of the defining challenges in modern drug development. The technical pipeline from compound identification through preclinical work, Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III trials to regulatory submission and approval is long enough on its own. But the gap she is most concerned with is subtler than timeline. It is the gap that opens when the development process is designed around what is technically measurable rather than what is clinically meaningful to the person who will ultimately take the drug.
She has pointed to FDA initiatives encouraging patient and caregiver perspectives in trial design as a structural step in the right direction, and she has been an active voice in arguing that the industry’s own interest in successful trials should motivate it to move further and faster in the same direction. The commercial logic and the patient-centred logic converge: trials that are designed with patients in mind retain participants at higher rates, produce better data, and ultimately have a clearer path to regulatory approval.
Investing in the Distance Between Lab and Life
At Propel Bio Partners, further profiled in Kawas’s coverage at leenkawas.news, Kawas has extended her patient-centred philosophy into the investment selection process. The fund evaluates companies not only on the scientific rigour of their approach but on the clarity of the pathway from the laboratory to a patient who will benefit. She has described the goal as investing in technologies that can help human health and make that help globally accessible, rather than concentrating innovation in populations that are already well-served by existing therapies.
Two of the companies on whose boards she currently serves illustrate this orientation. Inherent Biosciences uses machine learning to identify epigenetic biomarkers for male infertility diagnostics, addressing a diagnostic gap that has historically placed the full burden of investigation on women partners. Persephone Biosciences has conducted large-scale research into infant gut health and launched products designed to support microbiome development in the earliest years of life. In both cases, the scientific innovation is directed at a population whose needs have been systematically underserved by the existing research landscape.
Leen Kawas sees success not in the number of drug candidates that enter a pipeline but in the number that complete the journey from a laboratory hypothesis to a therapy that a patient can actually use. That is a higher and harder bar than most biotech metrics capture. It is also, she has argued, the only bar that fully justifies the time, capital, and scientific effort that drug development requires.
