Lori Lyons-Williams

Company: Abdera TherapeuticsTitle: President & CEOIndustry: PharmaceuticalsNotable in 2024: Lyons-Williams advanced Abdera's precision lung cancer therapies to the human trial phase and developed the company's pipeline of treatments for other forms of cancer.

Lori Lyons-Williams didn't start her pharmaceutical career in the biotech research lab – she was a salesperson at Johnson & Johnson – but she has risen through a series of high-profile executive positions within the industry, and moved in parallel with the expectation of greater breakthroughs in precision medicine. She has been associated with blockbuster drugs in past roles, but maybe none as critical as the pipeline she is leading today at Abdera.

Lyons-Williams career includes 15 years at Allergan, now part of AbbVie, where Botox was among the drugs she focused on. She translated that dermatological success into her first C-suite role as chief commercial officer of Dermira, which ended up being acquired by Eli Lilly for $1 billion.

More recently, the medical-entrepreneurial bug took her back to early stage biopharma, and in particular, precision medicine treatments that can be tailored more finely to patient biology. Lyons-Williams was president and chief operating officer of Neumora, which is developing precision medicines for brain diseases including depression, and went public in 2023.

The goals of Abdera are life-saving in nature, with its first drugs in a precision medicine pipeline targeting forms of lung and neuroendocrine cancer that are aggressive and hard to treat. The company estimates a global patient population with small cell lung cancer and large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma at 325,000, and those numbers are expected to increase in the years ahead. These are diseases where new treatments are sorely needed, with current survival rates rarely beyond a limited number of years.

When Abdera came out of stealth in 2023 with $142 million in funding, Lyons-Williams told Fierce Biotech that she expected big things from the company's science. "Having been in a couple of oncology companies on the board side, this is very different in terms of the mechanism of action, and you don't have to squint your eyes to figure out if you had a response or not," the CEO said.

Its "ROVEr" platform is described by Abdera as able to "design and develop tunable, precision radiopharmaceuticals for cancer."

"The ability to finely tune radioisotope delivery to the tumor, while sparing healthy tissue, remains a major challenge for this class of drugs," Lyons-Williams said in a company release at the time it emerged from stealth mode.

Bringing biotech breakthroughs to market will always be a high risk business. Neumora's performance since its IPO has suffered after a recent clinical trial for a depression treatment failed to live up to expectations.

But Abdera has a significant pipeline, and while it remains "proof of concept," it has begun to reach some key, early milestones. Last September, the FDA granted orphan drug status to its treatment for neuroendocrine carcinoma, a designation which helps drug companies working on potentially life-saving drugs, where treatments are lacking, get to market more efficiently. The company is currently enrolling patients in a Phase 1 clinical trial.