Konstantina Katcheves

Konstantina (Tina) Katcheves is the senior vice president and chief business and strategy officer of Acadia Pharmaceuticals, where she leads business development and corporate strategy. She joined Acadia in 2025 and has more than two decades of experience in biopharmaceutical dealmaking, corporate strategy, and innovation leadership.

Before Acadia, Katcheves served as senior vice president of global business development at Teva Pharmaceuticals, where she oversaw the expansion of the company’s innovative-medicines pipeline. Earlier, she held a series of senior roles at Bristol Myers Squibb, including interim head of enterprise strategy and business development. While at BMS she led the company’s $14 billion acquisition of Karuna Therapeutics, which moved the company more deeply into neuroscience with a novel schizophrenia treatment (KarXT), and helped drive more than $18 billion in announced transactions, including the acquisition of the radiopharmaceutical company RayzeBio. Across her career she has worked on deals spanning therapeutic areas, platforms, precision medicine, and cell and gene therapy, as well as international transactions.

Katcheves holds a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and cell biology from the University of California, San Diego, a Master of Science in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Oklahoma School of Law.

Katcheves appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Daphne Karydas, president and chief financial officer of Flare Therapeutics, for a conversation on mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships in the life sciences. She framed dealmaking as a discipline driven first by strategy: a transaction, she argued, has to advance a company’s long-term direction and address an unmet scientific need before financial considerations come into play.

Throughout the conversation she emphasized the organizational mechanics behind transactions: the internal champions required across clinical, commercial, and executive functions; the reality that living with a deal after signing is its own challenge; and her view that business development is an apprenticeship trade in which judgment accrues through years of exposure to deals that rarely go as planned.