Some of the most high-profile acquisitions in recent years have involved women-fronted biotechs. BioSpace reviews five of the most notable here.
Over the past few years, biopharma has witnessed many big-ticket takeovers, with some of the industry’s largest players dumping serious money to snap up an emerging company and its promising pipeline or platform.
These deals garner a lot of attention from analysts and the community at large—the transaction value, the assets at the heart of the agreement, the strategy behind the buyout—but typically very little fanfare is given to the people who made these acquisitions possible in the first place.
But many of the biggest and most impactful takeovers in recent years had women at the forefront. The biggest deal of 2025 so far, for instance, involves a woman-led biopharma, as does one of the highest-profile takeovers in the field of obesity.
Company leaders are often unsung heroes of these big transactions, working for years to build up a biotech to be an attractive acquisition target, and then spending a few hectic months hammering out a deal that appropriately values the company.
Considering the decline of women in leadership positions across the industry, BioSpace is taking this chance to give women leaders their due, compiling five of the biggest biotech exits led, orchestrated and made possible by women.
Sharon Mates
Founder, Chairman, CEO, Intra-Cellular Therapies since 2002
Buyer: Johnson & Johnson
Deal Value: $14.6 billion
Intra-Cellular Therapies has the distinction of being the target of this year’s largest M&A deal so far—a $14.6 billion buyout by healthcare powerhouse Johnson & Johnson.
Taking the biotech to that moment is Sharon Mates, who founded the New Jersey–based company in 2002 and serves as its CEO and board chairwoman. Under Mates’ leadership, Intra-Cellular hit several big milestones over the course of its lifespan, not least of which was securing an FDA approval for the atypical antipsychotic drug Caplyta in December 2019 for schizophrenia, and then again in December 2021 for bipolar depression.
During the biotech’s third-quarter 2024 earnings call, after years of demurring when asked by analysts to provide a sales forecast for Caplyta, Mates finally gave in, projecting that the drug would grow to be a $5 billion opportunity for the company over the next 10 years.
“We kept getting asked,” Mates told BioPharma Dive in November 2024. “So we said, ‘Okay, why not tell you? Here it is.’” In 2024, Caplyta surged 47% year-on-year to bring in $680.5 million.
Aside from Caplyta, Mates also oversaw Intra-Cellular’s initial public offering in March 2015, raising $130 million. The company has since grown considerably. In late 2024, before news of the J&J acquisition had broken, Intra-Cellular had a market cap of nearly $7 billion. This value has since doubled, with the company worth more than $14 billion as of July 2025.
Kate Haviland
President, CEO, Blueprint Medicines since 2022
Buyer: Sanofi
Deal Value: $9.5 billion
Since being appointed as Blueprint Medicines’ chief executive in January 2022, Kate Haviland has helped the kinase inhibitor Ayvakit—the biotech’s only current approved product—move closer toward realizing its true potential.
Ayvakit was first approved in January 2020 for gastrointestinal stromal tumors with certain mutations, and then again in June 2021 for systemic mastocytosis. Under Haviland’s leadership, Blueprint successfully expanded Ayvakit’s label again in May 2023, making the drug the first-ever approved therapy for indolent systemic mastocytosis.
Ayvakit sales under Haviland jumped from $110.9 million in 2022 to $204.2 million in 2023, representing more than 80% year-on-year growth. Last year, Ayvakit revenues more than doubled to $478.9 million.
The biggest Ayvakit milestone, however, came in June this year, when Sanofi dropped $9.5 billion to acquire Blueprint—a deal centered on the asset and its potential for substantial long-term growth, Brian Foard, Sanofi’s head of specialty care, said in an analyst call at the time. Ayvakit’s story is “just getting started,” he said.
As Blueprint CEO, Haviland also showed that she can pick a biotech up after a fall. In February 2023, Blueprint lost a powerhouse partner after Roche terminated a July 2020 agreement over the lung cancer drug Gavreto. Just a year later, however, Haviland helped find a new home for Gavreto, this time with Rigel Pharmaceuticals, which pledged nearly $120 million for the deal, plus tiered royalties.
Before taking Blueprint’s helm, Haviland played a critical role in keeping the biotech going. From January 2019 to April 2022, she served as chief operating officer, and before that, as chief business officer from January 2016 to January 2019. In both of these roles, Haviland had a heavy hand in forming and executing the biotech’s business and capital strategy.
Heather Turner
President, CEO, Carmot Therapeutics since 2023
Buyer: Roche
Deal Value: $2.7 billion
Heather Turner’s tenure as the head of Carmot Therapeutics might have been short—running from January 2023 to June 2024, according to her LinkedIn page—but it was arguably the most impactful period in the biotech’s life.
Under Turner’s leadership, Carmot’s pipeline of potentially best-in-class obesity assets grabbed the attention of Roche, which in December 2023 dropped $2.7 billion upfront, along with the promise of $400 million in milestone payments, to acquire the biotech. The deal, which closed in January 2024, has proven very fruitful for Roche, with Carmot’s early-stage GLP-1/GIP receptor dual agonist significantly lowering body weight versus placebo in a May 2024 Phase Ib readout.
A few months later, in July of that year, Carmot’s pipeline again delivered for Roche, with an oral GLP-1 analog eliciting a 6.1% placebo-adjusted reduction in body weight.
Before taking Carmot’s top executive seat, Turner briefly served as the biotech’s chief operations officer from September 2022 to January 2023, another short but impactful stint. In early January 2023, alongside Turner’s promotion to CEO, Carmot announced that it was spinning off a new company based on its proprietary discovery platform for oncology and immune indications.
Turner’s post-Carmot trajectory has likewise been impressive. In November 2024, she was appointed into the board of directors of Terns Pharmaceuticals, leveraging her experience with Carmot to help the California biotech advance novel therapies for obesity and other metabolic conditions, alongside cancer. Turner is also now serving as CEO of LB Pharmaceuticals, a New York company looking to distinguish itself in the schizophrenia space.
Laura Shawver
President, CEO, Capstan Therapeutics since 2022
Buyer: AbbVie
Deal Value: $2.1 billion
Laura Shawver has been Capstan Therapeutics’ leader since the company launched in September 2022. Under her wing the California biotech has gone from a scrappy cell therapy startup to a subsidiary of one of the industry’s biggest players.
To kick start Capstan, Shawver had $165 million in series A capital, as well as the backing of several Big Pharma players, including Pfizer, Bayer, Novartis, Eli Lilly and Bristol Myers Squibb. She made the most out of what she was given, building out the biotech’s proprietary in vivo cell engineering platform designed to deliver mRNA or gene editing payloads to address B cell–mediated and plasma cell diseases, among other conditions.
In March 2024, Shawver once again hooked Capstan’s high-profile backers, raising $175 million in an oversubscribed series B round. Months later, in November that same year, Capstan delivered promising preclinical data for its lead CAR T candidate CPTX2309, which was able to demonstrate in vivo engineering of CD8-positive cells and elicit B cell depletion in animal models.
These achievements culminated in June this year, when AbbVie doled out $2.1 billion in cash to acquire Capstan, a deal that hinged on CPTX2309 and the biotech’s engine.
Strategic exits are nothing new for Shawver. She was previously CEO of Synthorx, which in December 2019 was acquired by Sanofi for approximately $2.5 billion. A few years later, in mid-2022 when she was CEO of Silverback Therapeutics, Shawver helped negotiate a reverse merger with ARS Pharmaceuticals as Silverback was reeling from two discontinued assets.
Ivana Magovcevic-Liebisch
President and CEO, Vigil Neuroscience since 2020
Buyer: Sanofi
Deal Value: $470 million
Vigil Neuroscience debuted with $50 million in December 2020 with industry veteran Ivana Magovcevic-Liebisch in the top spot, bringing more than two decades’ worth of biopharma leadership experience.
In the years since, Magovcevic-Liebisch expanded Vigil’s coffers, raising $90 million through a series B round in August 2021, followed by a $75 million haul in August 2022 through a private placement with existing and new investors. In June 2024, Vigil received another $40 million in strategic investments from Sanofi.
Magovcevic-Liebisch and her team used this money to build out the biotech’s pipeline of novel neuro assets that work by activating a brain protein called TREM2, in turn opening up a novel pathway of addressing nervous system damage. This effort paid off, with an early-stage readout in January 2025 showing that its small-molecule drug candidate VG-3927 demonstrated an encouraging safety profile while also showing strong reductions in soluble TREM2 levels. Vigil has decided to move the asset into mid-stage trials.
Vigil stands out in the neuro space as being one of few players that have seen success with TREM2. Since AbbVie and Alector’s AL002 failed a mid-stage study in November 2024, the target has fallen out of favor of investors and analysts. “The failure of ABBV/ALEC’s AL002 in Alzheimer’s disease significantly diminished enthusiasm” for TREM2, Stifel wrote in a May 21 note.
Despite this dark cloud over TREM2, Magovcevic-Liebisch was able to leverage VG-3927’s potential to arrive at a $470 million acquisition agreement with Sanofi. The deal, which put a 250% premium on Vigil’s share price, paid particular focus to the small-molecule asset. Sanofi promised a contingent value right conditional on VG-3927’s first sale. If all goes well, the takeover value could reach $600 million.
