Many early stage life science companies spend long stretches without clear answers. The financing has not closed yet. The trial has not read out yet. The path forward is uncertain. Yet despite the pressure and uncertainty, you need a committed team that is willing to keep moving forward.

Nawal Ouzren’s story is one of immense perseverance, both personally and professionally, that ultimately delivered a strong outcome. She joined Sensorion as CEO in 2017, two years after the company listed on Euronext Growth. Over the following nine years, she repositioned the company from a small molecule business to a combination of gene therapy and small molecule programs, while leading her team through a series of challenging financing cycles.

These included a capital increase in 2019, described at the time as the largest in the company’s history, significant cost cutting during the COVID period followed by a €31 million raise to extend the runway, and €100 million raised across two rounds in less than nine months in 2024. In January 2026, Sensorion closed a €60 million placement anchored by Sanofi, the final financing of her tenure.

Repositioning the company’s investment case and securing the capital required to execute the strategy was immensely challenging, particularly because Sensorion was already a publicly listed company. Along the way, Nawal also scaled the organization from 13 people to 70 people.

There were periods during her tenure when the pressure was intense for everyone.

“At some point I was like, you know what? Now I’m going to focus on the things I can control. I’m not lying, I’m not cheating, I’m giving it my best, and whatever happens, happens.”

She made this mindset visible to her team.

“I bought a T shirt with the caption ‘One day at a time.’ They know me when I come in with that T shirt: guys, let’s not try to boil the ocean today.”

In this session, Nawal will talk about how she created a culture that could sustain performance under pressure, including:

• How she kept the team motivated when the outcome was uncertain.

• How she narrowed the team’s attention to the next controllable action, whether that was the next email, the next phone call, or simply the next task in front of them.

• The T shirt as a simple but powerful leadership signal that helped communicate a shift in mindset to the team.

• Her image of a leadership team as penguins in a huddle. The penguins that are warm move to the outside so that those who are cold can move towards the centre, creating a constant cycle of mutual support. She used this as a metaphor for how her leadership team supported one another.

• What she did personally to maintain resilience and avoid cracking under the pressure.

Why This Is Relevant for You

Your company culture will happen whether you intentionally build it or not. It is shaped largely by what leaders do under pressure, not by what they write in a mission statement.

Organizational theorist Edgar Schein points to a leader’s response to crises as one of the primary ways culture becomes embedded in an organization. Crisis is when people are watching most closely, and leaders’ behaviours become signals that others learn from and replicate.

At an early stage, this matters even more. The first five people you hire will closely observe your behaviour. What they see becomes the culture that the next fifty people inherit.

Questions to Reflect on Before the Session

How are you empowering your team to keep moving forward without waiting for you to have all the answers?

How do you communicate bad news, and does that approach hold up over a sustained period of pressure, rather than just during one difficult week?

When someone on your team is running low, who is expected to step in? Is that support intentionally built into the way you operate, or is it left to chance?

Nawal Ouzren, Former CEO of Sensorion

Nawal Ouzren was CEO of Sensorion, a French biotechnology company developing treatments for hearing loss disorders, from 2017 to 2026. She joined two years after the company’s 2015 IPO and led it through nine years of financing cycles, including the COVID period and a series of capital raises, culminating in a €60 million placement anchored by Sanofi in January 2026.

Before Sensorion, she spent close to two decades in leadership roles at GE, Baxter/ Baxalta and Shire, including heading multi-billions global Franchises (mainly in rare diseases). She currently serves as a non executive director of the Lundbeck Foundation and Croda International.