Two adages apply to the professional accomplishments of Intra-Cellular Therapies Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Sharon Mates.
The first? Good things come to those who wait. For years, Intra-Cellular Therapies was known as a relatively conservative health tech company, one that didn’t overstate its progress even as it moved toward lofty goals like treating schizophrenia and bipolar depression. This helped Dr. Mates and her company stand out in a business where big talk can lead to big disappointments.
The second adage? When you’ve got it, flaunt it. By the time it was ready to release projected sales figures for its brain-rebalancing drug Caplyta, used to treat schizophrenia and depression, Dr. Mates was happy to spill the beans. “We kept getting asked,” she said in a 2024 interview, “So we said, ‘Okay, why not tell you? Here it is.’”
The drug exceeded expectations, with the company projecting $5 billion in annual sales by the end of the decade. Not bad for a company that fought upstream for a decade against a biotech current that was moving away from psychiatry and neuroscience. “It wasn’t easy in the beginning,” said Dr. Mates, “but to me, that’s the time to get into something if you have conviction and believe in it. We knew there were patients [in need], and we thought we could develop better medicines.”
Shortly after Dr. Mates released the company’s projected sales numbers for Caplyta (which, she added, could go even higher), the company was provisionally sold to Johnson & Johnson in a $14 billion deal that closed in April. It was not your run-of-the mill acquisition, even for a company of J&J’s size, said J&J CEO Joaquin Duato: “These deals do not happen every day.”
What does happen every day is continued work on Caplyta from Dr. Mates and her team as the company, working in J&J’s Innovative Medicine unit, keep plugging away more than a decade after their work started. “As long as we can hire talented people, build a good team and have an equal share of voice in the marketplace,” said Dr. Mates, “the product speaks for itself.”
