The IPO gets treated like a finish line because it has all the visible signals of arrival: the ticker, the headlines, the bell, the sudden sharpness of public scrutiny. In biotech, it is tempting to let that moment stand in for the real work, as if the company has crossed from uncertain science into inevitable success.
Leen Kawas has built a career arguing, by the way she operates, that the public offering is only the start of a more demanding phase. She is the CEO of EIT Pharma, sits on the board of Inherent Biosciences, and is the co-founder and managing general partner of Propel Bio Partners, a biotech-focused venture firm. Before that, she co-founded and led Athira Pharma, taking it public in 2020 after raising more than $400 million across the company’s growth journey.
If you listen to how she frames that milestone, the emphasis is not on validation. It is on what the IPO enables, then what it demands.
The IPO as a tool, not a trophy
Biotech companies do not go public to celebrate. They go public to fund time. Drug development consumes time in a very specific way: it burns cash while it waits for results that cannot be rushed. An IPO, in Kawas’s framing, is a financing event that can extend the runway long enough for clinical programs to mature and for infrastructure to catch up to ambition.
Athira’s IPO in September 2020 raised $204 million in the offering itself, according to GeekWire’s coverage at the time. Yet the deeper story is what the IPO made possible. It created access to a broader capital base and a currency for partnerships, recruiting, and long-horizon planning. That is why Kawas treats the IPO as “beginning” territory. It is when a company becomes accountable to a new set of stakeholders while still needing to prove, in the most unforgiving way, that its science holds up.
Public markets replace one problem with several harder ones
Private biotech has one dominant constraint: fundraising. Public biotech has a more complex set of constraints, many of which feel less controllable.
After an IPO, the company must run rigorous clinical programs, communicate progress with discipline, and build internal systems that can survive constant scrutiny. It must also manage the psychological shift inside the team. The mission does not change, but the environment does. Every decision gets interpreted through signals. Timelines become storylines. Hiring becomes a statement.
Leen Kawas’s track record suggests she sees that shift early. Her bio on Propel Bio Partners highlights that she advanced multiple late-stage clinical programs and guided Athira through its IPO, tying capital raised to the operational demands of moving programs forward. The point is not that an IPO makes the work easier. It makes the work more visible, and visibility punishes weak systems.
The “beginning” is governance
One of the least glamorous post-IPO realities is governance. Public companies have to mature quickly: board processes, controls, audit readiness, compliance rhythms, investor relations. These are not optional layers. They are the scaffolding that keeps the scientific mission fundable.
Kawas’s later roles reinforce this orientation toward systems. At Inherent Biosciences, she is positioned as bringing expertise across drug discovery, clinical methodology, regulatory strategy, commercialization, and financing, the same domains that get stress-tested after a company goes public. At EIT Pharma, her CEO profile similarly emphasizes biotechnology leadership and investment experience, suggesting continuity in how she approaches execution once a company has to perform in public.
In other words, the IPO is when governance stops being an administrative detail and becomes part of the product.
The “beginning” is learning to build under pressure
Biotech is full of quiet tradeoffs that only become obvious when the stakes rise: how fast to expand a team, when to partner, how to allocate capital across a pipeline, what data to prioritize, how to communicate uncertainty without eroding trust. The IPO amplifies every one of those choices.
Kawas’s venture work at Propel Bio Partners points to a philosophy formed by that pressure. Propel’s team page frames her as leveraging experience as an inventor, scientist, and entrepreneur to support early-stage biotech innovation. The implicit lesson is that capital is not enough. The company needs operating judgment, especially once the market can react daily to incomplete information.
This is also why she often speaks about the IPO as a transition in responsibility. Once public, the company becomes a custodian of other people’s patience: investors, employees, partners, and patients waiting for therapies that may take years.
The “beginning” is returning to the real objective
A biotech IPO can distort priorities if leaders begin optimizing for market applause instead of clinical truth. Kawas’s story is useful because her emphasis repeatedly returns to the same anchor: the science has to work, and the organization has to be built to find out.
GeekWire’s reporting on Athira’s IPO captured her focus on the milestone as a step toward impacting patients, not as a conclusion. Propel’s materials describe her as having led the advancement of clinical programs through late stages, reinforcing the idea that financing events are meaningful only insofar as they fund progress.
That is the core of why she sees IPOs as just the beginning. The bell-ringing is easy to photograph. The beginning is what follows: building a company sturdy enough to survive long clinical timelines, honest enough to report what it learns, and disciplined enough to keep the mission intact while everything is louder.
Learn more about Leen Kawas in the below interview: