12 Apr What Biotech Can Learn from Immigrant Entrepreneurs, According to Leen Kawas
Posted at 17:53h
in Author Interviews
by Contributing Writer
There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from being an outsider. Immigrant entrepreneurs often arrive in a new country without the comfort of inherited networks or industry assumptions baked in by proximity. What they carry instead is a willingness to question what others have stopped noticing — and a particular intensity of purpose.
Few figures in biotechnology illustrate this dynamic more clearly than Leen Kawas, the Managing General Partner of Propel Bio Partners and one of the more distinctive voices in life sciences investing. Born and raised in Jordan, Kawas came to the United States in 2008 with a pharmacy degree and an ambition shaped in part by personal loss. Her grandmother had died of cancer. Her mother passed away young from a medical condition. Those experiences were not incidental to her career — they were the engine behind it.
Commitment as a Competitive Advantage
One of the first things Kawas tells founders, regardless of their background, is to commit fully. That counsel carries a different weight when it comes from someone who crossed an ocean and rebuilt a professional life from scratch. For immigrant entrepreneurs, the leap is rarely metaphorical. There is often no easy fallback, no established safety net of connections. That constraint — what might look like a disadvantage from the outside — can function as a clarifying force. It requires betting on a single direction and executing accordingly.
Kawas’s own trajectory followed that logic. After arriving in the U.S., she pursued a Ph.D. in molecular biology and found herself in her advisor’s office being asked if she wanted to co-found a biotechnology company. She had a secure job lined up. She said yes anyway. That company eventually went public in September 2020, raising over $400 million. Leen Kawas became the first woman in twenty years in Washington State to lead a company to IPO — and one of only twenty-two female founders in the United States to reach that milestone at the time.
Seeing Inefficiency That Insiders Overlook
The immigrant’s advantage in business is often described in broad strokes — resilience, hunger, adaptability. But Kawas points to something more specific: the fresh perspective that comes from not having absorbed an industry’s standard practices as given. Her advice to first-time entrepreneurs is to use their outsider outlook deliberately, identifying genuine inefficiencies rather than breaking things unnecessarily.
This logic applies directly to her investment philosophy at Propel Bio Partners, which she co-founded in 2022 alongside investor Richard Kayne. The firm is specifically positioned to support start-up and early-stage biotechnology companies thinking beyond conventional development paradigms — and Kawas’s own background as someone who questioned the field’s assumptions from the beginning informs how she evaluates that kind of thinking.
Building Networks Without a Head Start
Where immigrant entrepreneurs face a genuine structural challenge is in networking — the web of relationships that, in industries like biotech, can determine who gets funded, who gets hired, and whose ideas get the benefit of the doubt. Kawas doesn’t minimize this difficulty. But she also doesn’t treat it as insurmountable. Her advice is practical: find the appropriate venues, conferences, and places where you can meet people, and make yourself a self-made extrovert if necessary.
She also reframes what networking is actually for. The common mistake, she argues, is treating investor conversations as purely transactional — pitches aimed at securing capital, and nothing more. Kawas has described even failed funding pitches as opportunities: if the investor doesn’t write a check, ask what they would need to see, or who else they know. Ask for advice. Ask for introductions. Treat every conversation as a potential door, not just a transaction.
Diversity of Experience as Strategy
Kawas is direct about the value of what she calls diversity in business experience — not just demographic diversity, but the range of professional contexts and cultural backgrounds that people bring to a management team. At Propel Bio Partners, that conviction is built into the firm’s operating model. The fund has supported a number of companies led by women and founders from underrepresented backgrounds — not as a prescriptive quota, but as a reflection of Kawas’s view that the best innovation tends to emerge from the most varied perspectives.
Several studies have documented better financial performance in companies with diverse executive teams, and Kawas has cited this research consistently throughout her career. But her version of the case is less abstract than most — she has seen it function in practice, at companies she founded and at companies she now backs.
The Long View on Lows
Perhaps the most practical piece of advice Kawas offers to immigrant entrepreneurs — and to any founder navigating unfamiliar terrain — concerns how to interpret failure. There are going to be a lot of highs, she notes, but way more lows when working on a business. One of the best pieces of advice she received early in her career: if you are able to survive the lows, you are going to be very successful.
That perspective, earned rather than inherited, is part of what Leen Kawas brings to her current role. The path from Amman to a venture capital partnership built on principles of accessible, patient-centered healthcare innovation was not a straight line. But it was shaped by the specific clarity that comes from having started somewhere else — and from choosing, at each step, to ask what the industry could do better. Learn more about her work and investment philosophy at Propel Bio Partners.
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Last Updated on April 12, 2026 by Marie Benz MD FAAD
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