Remembering Lisa Burns, biotech’s ‘CEO whisperer’

An IR/PR pioneer, Burns connected CEOs, investors and analysts and played host to JPM’s best party

In biotech’s beginnings, you could fit all the industry’s big names in a single room. More often than not, they had been summoned to that room by Lisa Burns, whose spirit and intellect connected and energized biotech’s founders. No ordinary PR/IR person, Burns pioneered public/investor relations for the nascent biotech scene. She was the “CEO whisperer” to many of those who founded or funded companies in this industry.

More than that, she was biotech’s fashionista, who joyously welcomed guests to her annual reception at H&Q, later JPM, in The Rotunda atop Neiman Marcus, and she was the esprit de corps of the fledgling industry, weaving together the investors, CEOs and analysts who got biotech off the ground in the early 1990s.

“Lisa was very, very well-equipped to bring management, bring people and bring capital into one point for potential collision and that collision really was driven by getting to know people, developing a closer relationship, and building the trust that’s so critical when one wants to deploy capital,” Deerfield’s Bill Slattery told BioCentury.

Burns, who founded Burns McClellan Inc. in 1988, passed away unexpectedly this month. She was 67.

“Lisa was a pioneer in our field who had a profound impact both personally and professionally on her employees, her clients and the members of the investment community with whom she worked,” Diana Boter, Burn’s chosen successor, said in a statement. “To many of these people, myself included, she was much more than a colleague, an advisor or a mentor — she was also a dear friend. In the 36 years since she founded Burns McClellan, Lisa established an unparalleled reputation for excellence rooted in a steadfast dedication to serving as trusted partners for our clients.”

Since establishing the agency at a time when Genentech Inc. had a single approved drug, Burns McClellan grew along with the industry it championed, representing more than 400 biopharma companies across all phases of clinical and commercial development. These companies ranged from large pharmas such as Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE:BMY) and Novartis AG (SIX:NOVN; NYSE:NVS) to biotechs, including Alkermes plc (NASDAQ:ALKS), Gilead Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ:GILD) and Kite Pharma Inc.

Mary Tanner met Burns in 1988, just before she founded her agency. Burns asked the investment banker whether biotech was “for real.” At the time, the big PR/IR firms ignored biotech, and Burns seized the opportunity.

Burns was quick, energetic, honest and tough, Tanner told BioCentury, and she combined masterful due diligence skills and a huge Rolodex.

“She was extremely quick to seize the essence of the science but also at the same time the essence of the investment thesis,” Tanner said. “It was a rare ability to get both — and quickly and at the time of an emerging industry.” 

Franklin Berger, one of the top biotech analysts in the 1990s, noted that “she was perfectly matched to explain new technologies to investors.”

Tanner would ask Burns, who had an “encyclopedic knowledge of the industry,” to give her two paragraphs on a company. “It was better than going on a road show,” Tanner said. “If she said it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work.” Indeed, longtime biotech investor Brook Byers said he learned of CAR T by asking Burns what she was seeing that was new. She was already working with Kite at the time.

She also knew what made investors tick.

“Lisa was the person to go to if you needed to understand what the fund managers on Wall Street were thinking,” said BioCentury founder and Chairman Karen Bernstein.

Burns was especially gifted at speaking with CEOs.

“She delivered tough news through a silken sheet,” said Tanner, who added that Burns never lost friends in the industry whether it was good news or bad that she was delivering.

She also “got along with everyone,” said Byers, no small task when dealing with the sort of egos required to be an entrepreneur, let alone an entrepreneur in an industry rife with failure such as biotech.

Jeremy Levin, president and CEO of Ovid Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:OVID), said her skills went well beyond deft handling of CEOs.

“She represented the first and the most significant progenitor of expressing the value of the biotech industry to investors,” Levin told BioCentury. “Lisa’s contribution was to make investors attentive to what the true value was.” 

Levin also pointed to her immense EQ.

“It’s unlike pretty much any other industry because you fail so many times,” he said. “You have to be willing to take the risk with people, and she gave you the emotional wherewithal to take the risk with people.”

Crisis queen

Burns was the person you wanted at your side when a trouble hit, or when you needed to implement a strategic change to the company you were running. 

Frank Baldino, the force of nature who built Cephalon Inc. into one of the 20 biggest biotechs in the world, “would never move an inch without her by his side,” said Levin, who added that their “friendship was instrumental” in building Cephalon. Slattery also used the word instrumental in describing how she helped Vaughn Kailian navigate the market for Cor Therapeutics Inc.’s platelet inhibitor.

Burns could communicate concerns to a CEO that an investor “wouldn’t be bold enough to do so directly,” according to Slattery.

And when things fell apart, as they so often do in biotech, you would call Lisa.

“She was the go-to person when something terrible happened,” Richard Pops told BioCentury, whether it was a clinical flop or a regulatory setback. Pops, the longtime chairman and CEO of Alkermes plc (NASDAQ:ALKS), first worked with Burns in the early 1990s.

Levin credited Burns with playing a critical role in helping him implement fundamental change at Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE:BMY) and later at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE:TEVA; Tel Aviv:TEVA).

In the 2000s, when Levin was putting into place the “string of pearls” strategy of sourcing external innovation for BMS, he needed to “overcome the high degree of animosity” between small companies and the big companies — both of which thought “they knew better.”

Working with Burns, BMS kicked off a series of biotech-meets-pharma meetings, which Levin said, led to the first-ever BD forum at HQ.

“Today, you have thousands of companies [doing such forums], but at that time, only Bristol did it because Lisa helped me pull it together,” recalled Levin. “Lisa knew what it meant to be able to bring small companies together. And there was enormous skepticism. But once we were able to have that forum, we could meet.”

When Levin became CEO of Teva early in 2012, “not a single company” would talk to the Israeli company, which was seen as an “aggressive predator of the industry.” Burns, said Levin, worked with him to help investors understand “that you had to innovate Teva” and connected his team with smaller companies. The work done by Burns, an architect of Levin’s first presentation of Teva to industry, attracted biotechs to Teva, which “led to a set of acquisitions. And those today represent the largest revenue sources for Teva.”

‘Make it enjoyable’

Burns interwove the professional and the personal. Berger, the analyst, met Burns in the Starbucks on 78th and Lexington in Manhattan while ordering hot chocolate. Not long after they met, he hung out his shingle in her Park Avenue South office, which would form a “brain trust” in Byers’ words that included Tanner and Fred Frank, one of the founders of biotech investment banking who transformed the sector by constructing the first Genentech-Roche deal.

To the family of Slattery, she was an aunt, a sister and a godparent. 

“She was very kind to our children and recognized that they’re the most important people in our life,” Slattery said. “She wanted to reinforce that they’re important to us, they’re important to her.”

Paul Sekhri met her via a mutual acquaintance, who thought the serial entrepreneur might help Burns with her plans to expand her agency into Europe. Instant friends, not a week would go by without Burns and Sekhri texting, chatting or dining together. And Burns would represent every biotech that Sekhri would go on to lead.

The mutually beneficial interconnectivity Burns nurtured for those in her orbit is exemplified by a seating choice she made at one of her frequent — and fun — dinner parties. That night, Byers decided to bring his son Blake, then a biomedical engineering student at Duke. Burns knew just where to seat Blake — next to Steve Harr, then head of biotechnology investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Naturally — it was the Burns dinner party magic at work here, after all — that dinner conversation led to a summer job for Blake, who a few years later would go on to Google Ventures and invest in then private, Harr-led Sana Biotechnology Inc. (NASDAQ:SANA). The two are friends to this day.

The meal she hosted, however, was her weekly lunch at Freds atop midtown Manhattan luxury department store Barneys, where she had a standing table for six. “She was greeted as a queen upon her arrival,” recalled Levin, and the meals melded her love of biotech and fashion. Guests included Slattery, then-biotech analyst Jami Rubin, and Byers, whenever he was in town from the West Coast, among others.

“She would hold court,” said Byers. “Nerds talking biotech in a fashion store on Madison Avenue.”

Lunches would always begin with Burns ordering French fries for the table, said Tanner. The fries had to be crispy, or back they would go.

And then there were the parties. Or rather The Party, Burns’ annual Monday night reception at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. In the H&Q days, “no one else dared put on a cocktail party on Monday night,” said Byers. To this day, he can’t fathom how Burns remembered the name of every guest, whom she’d greet as they came out of the elevator with a kiss on the cheek. “It was the place to network. And it was like the unofficial kickoff of JPM.”

Said Slattery, “It was one of the best parts of a grueling four days in San Francisco.”

“She understood how immeasurably difficult it was, so she had to make it enjoyable,” Levin said. “One of her ways of celebrating and making it enjoyable was, even back at the inception of the industry, bringing people together to simply enjoy each other.”

Said Bernstein, “She was most definitely the person who threw the best parties at H&Q — where everyone came to see and be seen and hang out with their friends. Always in the best dress of the meeting.”

Although the invite to her JPM party was coveted, she was more than happy to add someone to the list. “All you had to do was take her to coffee once a year,” said Sekhri, one of her closest friends.

Burns would also have salon-like events at her Manhattan apartment, which, like her house in La Garde-Freinet in France’s Côte d'Azur, featured the interior design touches of Nye Basham, with black-and-white photographs on the walls.

“She did everything possible, and I think she succeeded beyond people’s wildest dreams, in turning her house into really a welcoming, welcoming home. That’s what she wanted for herself and that’s what people felt when they walked in,” said Sekhri.

“She was an extraordinary friend,” said Tanner. “A great mentor and friend.”

Burns was a board member of Genesis Pharmaceuticals; Sapient Health Network, a division of Web MD/Healtheon; and the Irvington Institute. She was also a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Women’s Health Research, and the founder of its corporate advisory council.

Burns is survived by her brother, John “Jeb” Burns; his wife, Leslie; their two children; and her countless friends and colleagues. A celebration of her life is being planned for the fall.

Today and in the future, when biotech’s luminaries gather, whether they know it or not, a bit of their glow will come from Lisa Burns.