The US biopharmaceutical industry is a global powerhouse. Working at the cutting edge of research, it is the world’s leading laboratory, the source of therapeutics for millions of patients everywhere.

Fueled by breakthroughs and a highly educated workforce, the industry employs a significant proportion of Asian Americans, particularly South Asian (e.g. ethnic Indians and Pakistanis) and East Asian Americans (e.g. ethnic Chinese and Koreans).¹

Indeed, many East Asian Americans are leading the most innovative sectors of the industry.

But despite their success, East Asian Americans remain notably absent from one critical area: the top leadership positions in the industry’s biggest companies. Here, East Asian Americans hold just 1.2 percent of board seats and 3 percent of C-suite roles.

That is only about a third of the share of East Asian American leaders in the broader industry, and likely substantially less than their share of the biopharma workforce.

This glaring difference highlights a critical shortcoming in the pipeline supplying talent to the most prominent positions within biopharma. And it is a gap the industry can ill afford: as drug development costs continue to climb and the prevalence of infectious diseases, cancers, and chronic conditions increases, biopharma must draw on the best talent available to navigate these complex demands.

For the first time, research by ElevAAte, a new non-profit dedicated to the advancement of East Asian Americans in biopharma, shines a light on the stark contrast in the industry between the success of East Asian Americans in the sector as a whole and their scarcity at the leadership of the largest companies.

Our review, covers publicly traded therapeutics companies with market capitalizations of over $500 million in August 2024. We excluded companies with foreign headquarters, such as Novo Nordisk, Takeda, Roche and other companies, where demographics, labor laws, and norms differ from the US.

The resulting list included 181 companies, ranging from the behemoth Johnson & Johnson, founded in 1885, with 42,000 employees and revenue of over $85 billion, to the median-sized biotech company with just 160 employees and founded within the last 30 years.

To start, looking across all companies in our sample, we found that East Asian Americans hold 6 percent of seats on company boards and 7 percent of C-suite roles.²

And they’re not concentrated in just one or two roles within the C-suite, either: they’re general counsels, chief medical or finance officers.

East Asian Americans account for 7 percent of CEOs. Some examples include Arthur Kuan who is the CEO of CG Oncology, which raised $437 million through its IPO and is developing a bladder cancer immunotherapy; Ying Huang who leads Legend Biotech, maker of a cell therapy for multiple myeloma patients, Carvykti, which has projected 2025 revenue of $1.9 billion; and Mina Kim, a lawyer by training, who recently succeeded Shao-Lee Lin, the founder of Acelyrin, which is developing immunotherapies for eye diseases.

At the largest US biotech companies and “Big Pharma” organizations, like Merck, Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, there are far fewer East Asian Americans in the C-suites and boardrooms.

As of January 2025, only five East Asian Americans – out of 160 positions – were in the C-suites of these large US-headquartered companies:

• Dean Li, executive vice president and president of Merck Research Laboratories at Merck,
• Sandra Leung, executive vice president and general counsel at Bristol Myers Squibb,
• Stacey Ma, executive vice president of pharmaceutical development and manufacturing at Gilead,
• Howard Chang, senior vice president of global research and chief scientific officer at Amgen,
• Burt Park, chief governance counsel and corporate secretary at Viatris.
   

None is a CEO. Nor has there ever been an East Asian American CEO of a Big Pharma company based in the US.

The difference between leading these companies versus small and mid-cap biotechs is not just a question of size.

While many new medicines are developed at biotech companies, it is the large biotech and pharma companies, all of which have full-fledged commercial operations, that have an outsized role in the delivery of medicines to patients. The bulk of the industry’s profits, and direct impact on lives, come from these dozen or so companies, as many mid- to small-sized biotechs focus on earlier stages of drug development such as clinical testing.

In other words, Big Pharma’s leaders hold the national and global stage in a way that leaders of small and mid-sized biotechs do not.

Despite the success of East Asian Americans in the wider industry, they often do not get the opportunity to be CEO unless they create it on their own.

East Asian American CEOs are twice as likely to be a founder compared with a white CEO. When a CEO is white, she or he – more often he³ – is more likely to have been selected by the board than when the CEO is East Asian. Half of East Asian American CEOs are founders of their company.⁴

While founders do not usually have the exclusive power to select leadership, they have significant influence as the owner of the intellectual property or the individual organizing the assets and funds.

But what’s going on at the larger companies? Are there perhaps few East Asian Americans working in them at all?

Employers are only required by US law to count Asian Americans as a whole, combining South Asians, East Asians and others.

Nevertheless, we see that at the bigger biopharma companies, there is a robust Asian American presence at the professional entry level at 25 percent, or one in four workers.

But the share of Asian Americans declines dramatically above mid-level roles.

In contrast, the share of white Americans increases at each stage, from 56 percent at professional entry jobs to 76 percent of C-suite roles.

At the C-suite level, the percentage of Asian Americans is just 11 percent. From our own research, we know that just a quarter of that thin slice is East Asian American.⁵

The challenge in understanding why East Asian Americans are not at the helm of bigger companies starts with the lack of data that disaggregate Asian subgroups.

Originally coined by anti-war student activists at Berkeley in 1968, the term, “Asian American” applies to a wide range of people with distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds, such as Filipinos, Indians, Tibetans and Koreans.

Today, Asian Americans total around 24 million and are the fastest growing group among the major categories in the US. As such, current data collection needs to reflect the rapidly changing landscape.

Distinguishing among Asian subgroups such as South, Southeast and East Asians is particularly consequential for an industry like biopharma, where Asian Americans represent a significant part of the professional workforce.

Efforts by the US government to start collecting disaggregated data on Asian American subgroups will help drive better research and informed policies.

In the meantime, our organization, ElevAAte, will take a 360-degree approach to improving access to opportunities for East Asian Americans: providing training and programming for professional development, and connecting experienced East Asian American executives with rising leaders for mentoring and support during their career journey.

We hope this report might prompt conversation, laying the groundwork to shift implicit perceptions of leadership that often exclude people of color, like East Asian Americans.

Beyond missing out on the benefits of having company leadership reflect and represent the workforce, the largest biopharma companies are underutilizing a pool of proven leaders who are driving scientific innovation and creating and managing breakthrough companies.

And at a time when evolving threats from diseases demand constant ingenuity, it is not just East Asian Americans who will benefit from their representation at the top of large companies, but the companies, and the industry, as a whole.

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Written by Elaine Chen.

Thanks to Buck Gee, Cissy Young, and Jackson Lu for their contributions and insights. And special thanks to Margery Ho and Shawn Fu for many hours of research.