Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Margarita Chavez

While corporate strategy ebbs and flows and companies merge and acquire it can be hard for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to find a point of consistency.

Fortunately, for AbbVie, which demerged from Abbott, its reputation as a serious investor in very early-stage biotechs has been aided by the constant presence of Margarita Chavez at the firm for more than a decade.

Chavez, who was on last year’s Rising Stars list, was nominated again by Scott Brun, vice-president in the corporate strategy office and head of AbbVie Ventures. When nominating her last year, he said: “Margarita was promoted to senior director at AbbVie Ventures [in early 2016] and has taken on increased responsibility with management oversight for our San Francisco Bay area presence.

“She has played a key leadership role during the rechartering of AbbVie Ventures as we have evolved towards a strategic investing approach aligned with our core research and development therapeutic areas.

“Her extensive personal relationships and depth of transactional experience are a strong resource for our team.”

Chavez said she had been with AbbVie Ventures since its inception in 2009 and lead investments in more than a dozen biotechs, which have included exits from AM Pharma (Pfizer’s option to acquire the portfolio company closed last year) and Creabilis, which Sienna Biopharmaceuticals for about $150m.

AbbVie’s main investments this past year include Jnana Therapeutics, which raised a $50m round series A round in December to develop drugs targeting solute carrier transporters, proteins that move substances across cellular membranes, for immune-oncology therapies and Palleon Pharmaceuticals, which raised $47.6m in October for its mission to discover cancer therapies related to the glyco-immunosuppression axis.

The firm also contributed to a $30m series A round for Disarm Therapeutics, a company that aims to inhibit a protein called Sarm1, identified as a driver of axonal degeneration, responsible for disability and disease progression conditions affecting the central, ocular and peripheral nervous system; as well as a $31.3m round for Exicure, which is using nanotechnology to build spherical nucleic acids that can enter cells without producing an immune response as a treatment for inflammatory diseases, genetic disorders and cancer.

Until her promotion to senior director Chavez had previously been director of venture investments after six years split between being legal counsel and director of global licensing and business development (BD) for what was then Abbott from 2004.

Deals she worked on in licensing and acquisitions included the acquisition of the company’s Lupron franchise, which has about $500m in annual revenue, and the divestiture of Flebuxostsat through the dissolution of a joint venture. Chavez also worked on the licensing of Elagolix, currently in phase three for endometriosis and uterine fibroids.

Before joining AbbVie / Abbott, she worked as a deal lawyer in Silicon Valley with law firm Brobeck Phleger & Harrison, representing corporate clients in IPOs, M&A and equity financings.

She added that what had attracted her to corporate venturing had been “the opportunity to enable discovery and development of novel, transformational therapies by leveraging internal and external relationships and facilitating the symbiosis between the accomplished drug developers of AbbVie R&D and top researchers, innovators in academia and elsewhere in the ecosystem”.

And Chavez noted for last year’s award that her greatest successes had been leading “the acquisition of a biotech whose platform has been one of the cornerstones of our oncology efforts and the build-to-buy deal that is one of the most exciting microbiome programs currently in development”.

In addition, Chavez said she was consulted “each time our R&D organisation and BD gives serious consideration to do a strategic transaction with one of our portfolio companies”.

These deals include Abbott / AbbVie’s option to acquire Alvine, which, while not exercised, enabled the portfolio company “to fully prosecute the science and AbbVie to investigate its potential to transform the lives of Celiac patients,” Chavez said.

However, building a reputation with both external and internal stakeholders as a serious venture investor in biotechs “separate and apart from BD” remains her biggest challenge. It is something no doubt eased if she succeeds in her ambition to enable a blockbuster drug or biotech to be built, which could come if the corporate venturing industry as a whole ”develops a willingness to take greater risks with technologies / science that can truly transform humanity”.

But it is a goal that Chavez, a practitioner of yoga and pilates, remains admirably balanced about as she also tries “to see my family in California and Manila and hangout with my partner in crime / love of my life and our newly-adopted rescues”.