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When Anabella Villalobos left her hometown of Panama City in 1981 to pursue a master’s degree in the US, she was filled with excitement for what she thought would be a short time abroad. “I never really planned on staying,” she recalls. “I always had in the back of my mind that I’d be back.”
Vitals
Hometown: Panama City
Education: BS, chemistry, University of Panama; PhD, medicinal chemistry, University of Kansas, 1987
Current position: Head of biotherapeutics and medicinal sciences, Biogen
Professional advice: Be open to and seek feedback. It will make you a better person.
Favorite element: Carbon. We need carbon to make medicines for patients.
Favorite music: Salsa. I am a big fan of Rubén Blades, a Panamanian salsa singer.
I am: Latina
But that initial journey away from the sunny coasts where Villalobos loved spending time growing up turned into a decades-long climb to the top of the US pharmaceutical industry. Villalobos, who now serves as the head of biotherapeutics and medicinal sciences at Biogen, has developed first-in-class treatments for neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and made a name for herself getting new therapeutics into the clinic.
She first fell in love with the molecular world during a high school organic chemistry class. “I actually still have my notebook from my senior year,” which she keeps close by even now. She went on to study chemistry at the University of Panama, which was then the only institution in the country granting chemistry degrees.
While preparing for graduate school, she received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, which decreased financial barriers to the master’s program. And the bilingual education she received while a student in Panama reduced the language barriers she faced at a US-based institution. “Panama is a country that has a lot of influence from the US,” she says. But even so, she laughs when she thinks back to perfecting her conversational English. “My fellow graduate students would speak a hundred miles a minute.”
Villalobos stayed at the University of Kansas after her master’s degree to complete a PhD in medicinal chemistry. She then served as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. Although originally interested in oncology, Villalobos landed her first pharmaceutical job in Pfizer’s neuroscience group in 1989. She soon developed a passion for neurological diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s disease.
Back then, scientists knew little about the underlying causes of the condition. Alzheimer’s “is a difficult disease that requires a lot of patience,” she says. “It’s more difficult to see if you’re making an impact on the brain” than on other organs that you can more easily take a biopsy of.
One of her first projects at Pfizer involved the design and development of icopezil, a drug to treat the cognitive symptoms of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. Icopezil advanced to Phase 2 clinical trials and was in a similar mechanistic class as the first group of drugs that the US Food and Drug Administration later approved to treat cognition in Alzheimer’s, such as donepezil and rivastigmine. “It was one of the most rewarding experiences that I’ve had,” she says. “It was my first entry into the clinical space, and it taught me about the development path to advance a medicine to patients,” including scientific, regulatory, and clinical aspects of developing a drug.
But donepezil and other early treatments for Alzheimer’s did not slow the disease’s progression, so Villalobos set her sights on developing a disease-modifying treatment—a drug that would target the central cause of the disease. She kept that goal in mind as she rose through the ranks at Pfizer, eventually becoming the company’s head of medicinal synthesis technologies.
To find neuroscience drug candidates that would advance further in the clinic, Villalobos helped create a central nervous system multiparameter optimization (CNS MPO) tool (ACS Chem. Neurosci. 2010, DOI: 10.1021/cn100008c). Whereas previous design approaches judged a molecule’s properties against individual rules to determine drug potential, the CNS MPO scored six key properties for CNS drugs and created a composite score, widening the field of potential CNS drugs by including molecules that may buck certain rules but can still, for example, pass from the bloodstream into the brain. This tool has become a “standard in the field,” says Michael Ehlers, who previously worked with Villalobos as the chief scientific officer for neuroscience at Pfizer.
Ehlers and Villalobos collaborated to push for more successful clinical results for the neuroscience team. “We utilized a much more experimental approach to early clinical development, and Anabella was an essential partner during that process,” Ehlers says. The two worked well together, developing a robust portfolio of drug candidates with “exciting clinical data,” Ehlers says.
Alzheimer’s “is a difficult disease that requires a lot of patience.
After Ehlers moved to Biogen in 2016 to lead the company’s research and development efforts, he recruited Villalobos to help integrate Biogen’s medicinal chemistry research with its therapeutic modalities. “It was a bigger role for me,” Villalobos says. “I had an opportunity to learn more about biologics and gene therapy,” going beyond just the small molecules she focused on while at Pfizer.
Biogen has had recent successes in treatments that modify Alzheimer’s disease, most recently with the FDA’s approval of a monoclonal antibody, lecanemab, developed in partnership with Eisai. It’s the first fully approved Alzheimer’s drug that treats the disease, not just the symptoms, by reducing the number of amyloid-β plaques in the brain. Scientists consider these clumps of protein fragments to be a root cause of Alzheimer’s.
Credit: Jodi Hilton
Anabella Villalobos (center) and Biogen scientists Nadia D’Lima (left) and Ye Wang (right) apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to drug discovery and development.
“It’s very encouraging for someone like me who’s been in the field for a long time,” Villalobos says. “To see the first set of approvals for disease modification is very rewarding, and I believe there will be more.”
Besides Villalobos’s record of scientific success, Ehlers emphasizes that her leadership and mentorship skills are what make her special. “She’s a magnet for talent,” he says.
Villalobos says building the next generation of scientific leaders is a core responsibility of her work. She identifies people’s strengths and gets them started in areas she knows they’ll be good at. “They gain their confidence from there,” she says. “Then they take off.”
“She brings out the best in people,” says Gayathri Ramaswamy, who Villalobos has mentored since they met at Pfizer over a decade ago. “It’s very rare to meet someone like Anabella—a strong, smart scientist and leader who has a great deal of empathy and emotional intelligence,” Ramaswamy says.
She remembers Villalobos encouraging her to voice her opinions in meetings when there are far louder voices in the room. “I encourage women to raise their hand, be ready to tell their story, and ask for what they want,” Villalobos says.
Between science and mentoring, Villalobos still finds time to make a trip to Panama each year with her family and visit the beaches of her childhood. More often, though, she finds these comforts along the coast near her Connecticut home, and every once in a while, she thumbs through her high school chemistry notebook even though the pencil notes have faded.
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