Dr. Reshma Kewalramani

Company: Vertex PharmaceuticalsTitle: President & CEOIndustry: PharmaceuticalsNotable in 2024: Dr. Kewalramani won regulatory approval for its sickle-cell therapeutic CASGEVY, the world's first approved therapy using CRISPR gene editing technology.

In the world of drug and biotech corporations, it is still rare for women to rise to the very top, which makes the story of Vertex Pharmaceuticals' CEO Dr. Reshma Kewalramani even more notable.

Being CEO of a Fortune 500 global company wasn't in her career path early on. She was trained in internal medicine and nephrology, and as she told a Babson College publication in advance of a commencement address there, after medical school she planned to teach, treat patients and work in the lab. But working on new medicines was a passion she couldn't shake and couldn't be successful in from that life.

"I realized if I wanted to do that — drug discovery, clinical trials, make new medicines — that actually happens in industry, whether it's biotech or pharma," Kewalramani said in the Babson interview, "that's really the heart of where that action is."

That action has taken Vertex to places no biotech has ever gone before since she took the CEO helm in 2020 after years in executive roles at Vertex and Amgen, with a series of breakthrough drugs and approvals.

In December 2023, Vertex received approval from the U.S. government for Casgevy, co-developed with CRISPR Therapeutics, and using the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing CRISPR technology, to treat sickle cell disease, the first drug using CRISPR to be approved in the U.S.

In January of last year, Casgevy was also approved for transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia, or TDT, in the United States.

Late in 2024, the FDA approved once-a-day treatment for cystic fibrosis, the latest in a steady wave of successes from the company to treat that disease.

In January of this year, the FDA approved the company's non-opioid painkiller pill, the first drug company in decades to receive approval for a new type of pain medicine in a country in which the opioid epidemic has destroyed countless lives and communities, and a drug that may serve as many as 80 million patients.

Since 2017, Vertex says it has more than doubled its employee base and the number of medicines it offers.

"We don't do incremental improvement, we innovate to transform or cure, and we serially innovate. We simply are relentless in that way, and our own history has taught us to be like that," Kewalramani said in the Babson interview.

Cost, though, remains a hurdle with breakthrough drugs. Casgevy has a list price of $2.2 million in the United States for both the approved indications.

In December, the government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reached a deal with Vertex to increase distribution of the drug, which has only reached a tiny percentage of the estimated 100,000 Americans who suffer from sickle cell disease.

For those who have received the treatment, it has been life-changing.

DJ Chow, one of the patients who has been treated with Casgevy recently told CNBC that he is starting to let himself dream about doing the things he's always wanted to do. "Learn how to snowboard and surf and do all these things … experiences I never really got to do because of my sickle cell," he said.

The string of successes that start in the lab has led to financial milestones few women in the drug industry have ever reached. In 2023, Kewalramani's over $20 million in total compensation placed her in a club of pharma CEO pay packages that has been small, and all male, in recent years: Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, AbbVie and Pfizer, according to Fierce Biotech.

She is the lone woman atop a global pharma company valued at over $100 billion.