Last year, 11 major M&A deals were signed with women-led biotechs. The industry is nowhere near on track to meet that bar for 2026.
One of the most surprising and refreshing M&A trends of 2025 was the number of women at the helm of target companies. IntraCellular Therapies’ Sharon Mates, Blueprint Medicines’ Kate Haviland and Avidity Biosciences’ Sarah Boyce captured three of the top four spots of highest value deals for the year.
In total, women led the companies behind 11 deals out of 72 biopharma M&As in 2025, according to a BioSpace analysis.
But that trend has not held in 2026.
This year, just two major deals have been signed with companies helmed by a woman: Merck bought Terns Pharmaceuticals, which is run by Amy Burroughs, for $6.86 billion and Eli Lilly picked up The Vaccine Company, led by Susan Silbermann, for up to $1.55 billion. And that’s out of 73 deals to date already, with a whole quarter to go, according to data from S&P Capital IQ.
If you include reverse mergers, which have also taken off this year, the number of deals featuring women-led companies jumps to four, thanks to Synlogic’s Principal Executive Officer Mary Beth Dooley and Cyclerion Therapeutics’ CEO Regina Graul.
There’s also Vidya Therapeutics, which does not have a publicly listed CEO but was founded by Sheila Gujrathi, who serves as executive chair. The company sold to Processa Pharmaceuticals in June for about $319 million, according to S&P Capital IQ.
This analysis does not look at the wider C-suites of the companies in question. We know women are contributing to deals and venture capital raises in other executive positions. But the notable decline in women-led biotech targets even as M&A has rebounded in the industry means that the proportion of these exiting biotechs that have a woman in charge has dropped dramatically since last year—from more than 15% to less than 5%.
We also took a look at the larger biopharma space using a list of publicly listed therapeutics companies based in the U.S. with the largest market caps. We found 53 female CEOs across 432 companies for which data was publicly available. That’s just 12% of publicly listed biopharmas.
About this analysis: BioSpace compiled a list of M&A deals with an available deal value from S&P Capital IQ. The largest companies by market cap were obtained from CompaniesMarketCap and sorted to remove non-therapeutics companies and those headquartered outside of the U.S. CEO names and gender for all analyses were compiled using Microsoft Copilot with fact checking by Senior Editor Annalee Armstrong for accuracy.
