The life sciences industry has long operated with a particular geography in mind. Clinical trials are designed around populations that are accessible and cooperative. Drug development programmes target diseases where the paying market is largest. Regulatory strategies are built around the FDA and the EMA. The result is an industry that has produced extraordinary science for a subset of the world’s patients while leaving significant unmet need unaddressed in the populations that sit outside that subset. Leen Kawas has been thinking about this problem for most of her career, as argued here, and her current work reflects a deliberate effort to act on that thinking.
Kawas grew up in Jordan and came to the United States in 2008 to pursue doctoral research, explored in this profile. That trajectory, from a pharmacy degree at the University of Jordan to a Ph.D. in molecular pharmacology at Washington State University, to co-founding and leading a US public biotech company, gives her a perspective on global health that is not common in American biotech leadership. She has described the biotechnology industry as having tremendous potential to address global health challenges, and she has been direct about the gap between that potential and current practice.
The Clinical Trial Diversity Argument
Kawas has spoken and written on the importance of diversity in clinical trials, a subject that connects directly to the global thinking argument. A trial that recruits patients from a narrow demographic range produces data that reflects that range. The therapy that emerges may work differently, or less well, or require different dosing in populations that were not adequately represented in the development programme. This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a well-documented feature of pharmaceutical development that has consequences for how treatments perform across different populations after approval.
Her advocacy for more diverse and representative trial populations is framed as a scientific argument as much as an ethical one. She has pointed to advances in computational power and data science as enabling a more holistic view of patients, one that can incorporate genetic, environmental, and demographic diversity in ways that earlier research methods could not accommodate. The technological capability to run more globally inclusive development programmes has outpaced the industry’s willingness to invest in doing so, and she has been consistent in making that gap visible.
What EIT Pharma Represents
The breadth of Leen Kawas’s global health argument is clearest in her role as CEO of EIT Pharma. The company focuses on developing treatments for infectious diseases with significant unmet needs, specifically Hepatitis D and Acute Respiratory Infections. These are conditions that disproportionately affect patient populations in lower- and middle-income countries, where the commercial incentives that typically drive pharmaceutical development are weakest. The patient-centric framing she applies to EIT Pharma’s work reflects a conviction that no patient should be left behind because of where they live or what their disease costs to treat.
This is a different kind of biotech mission than the one that tends to dominate venture-backed life science investment, as reflected on EIT Pharma’s team page. The companies that attract the largest funding rounds are typically pursuing conditions with large addressable markets in wealthy countries. Kawas has not abandoned the commercial logic of the industry, but she has positioned herself deliberately at the intersection of scientific rigour and health equity, building programmes and funding structures that can hold both values at once.
Building a Global Investment Lens
Propel Bio Partners, the venture fund Kawas co-founded in 2022, describes itself as a global fund. The emphasis on supporting diverse and underrepresented founders, including women and those from backgrounds that have historically had limited access to life science capital, reflects the same logic applied to the investment side of the industry. The founders who will solve global health problems are not concentrated in any single geography or demographic. Expanding the funnel of who gets backed expands the range of problems that get worked on.
Kawas has spoken about the importance of traveling, learning about new cultures, and staying genuinely curious about the world outside the US biotech ecosystem. More of her thinking is at https://leenkawas.news. For a field that aspires to improve human health across populations, that curiosity is not incidental. It shapes which questions get asked and which patients get considered at the design stage of a programme, long before a therapy reaches the clinic. Her argument is that a biotech industry that thinks globally from the beginning, rather than treating global as an afterthought to a domestic strategy, will produce both better science and better outcomes.