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or more than 100 years, the billionaire Angelini family had been content to run a largely European business empire from their headquarters in Rome: pharmaceuticals like the Italian equivalent of Tylenol and the antidepressant trazodone, as well as a robotics business, wineries (of course) and a joint venture with Procter & Gamble to sell Pampers and other consumer products in their native Italy.
But after former banker and law professor Sergio Marullo di Condojanni married Thea Paola Angelini, now the family’s fourth-generation controlling shareholder, in 2017, the two began plotting a major expansion of Angelini Pharma, its drug business. By 2024, they’d set their sights on the largest and most innovative pharmaceutical market in the world.
“What was clear from the beginning is that the U.S., in the pharmaceutical space, is mandatory,” Marullo di Condojanni, 48, tells Forbes.
Last November, Marullo di Condojanni zeroed in on Coral Gables, Florida-based Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, a biotech focused on rare diseases that was then publicly traded. During a meeting with its CEO Rich Daly at the swanky Chancery Rosewood hotel on London’s Grosvenor Square, which had once been the U.S. embassy, Marullo di Condojanni turned on the charm. “He’s very Italian—dressed to the nines,” Daly says. The two bonded over their approach to drug development, and the way that their companies—one in the U.S. working on rare neurological and neuromuscular diseases, the one outside the U.S. looking at brain disorders like epilepsy and depression—could fit together.
In May, with the help of Blackstone and Italy’s CDP Equity, Angelini Pharma agreed to pay $4.1 billion in cash to buy Catalyst, a premium to its market cap at the time. The deal, which closed in July, catapulted the Italian firm into the United States and the rare-disease market.
While Angelini is little known in the United States, it has a long and storied history in Italy. With $1.5 billion in revenue before the Catalyst deal, Angelini Pharma is the largest piece of the Angelini family’s broader group, Angelini Industries, which rang up total revenue last year of some $2.5 billion. Forbes estimates that Thea Paola Angelini and family are worth some $10 billion. The 39-year-old is the controlling shareholder, though her father, Francesco Angelini, 80, retains both a minority stake and additional economic rights in her majority position.
“Entrepreneurs are starting to change the traditional move that you stay in Europe, you stay in Italy.“
Family-owned businesses often flounder or sell off at the third generation, and even fewer survive and thrive into the fourth. But Thea Paola Angelini (whose focus is the family’s philanthropy and who declined to speak with Forbes) and Sergio Marullo di Condojanni, who is CEO of both Angelini’s parent company and Angelini Pharma, had greater ambitions than running a sleepy company that churns out cash from drugs invented in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “We decided we needed to rekindle the innovation story that had been here many years ago,” Marullo di Condojanni says. Along with buying Catalyst, the group also set up its own small venture fund, seeded with $350 million in capital, to invest in promising life-sciences startups, such as Switzerland-based Nouscom, which is working on a cancer vaccine.
Expanding to the U.S. is an unusual move for an Italian company. In Italy, the majority of companies are family-owned and many stay focused within Europe. “The new generation was more ambitious,” says Alessandro Zattoni, a professor of strategy at Luiss Business School in Rome, who has written a case study of the Angelini family business. “Entrepreneurs are starting to change the traditional move that you stay in Europe, you stay in Italy,” he says. “Coming to the States is not easy, but if you succeed you have a huge market.”
Back in December 1919, Francesco Angelini (Thea’s great-grandfather), then a 32-year-old pharmacist, started a small business for the production and sale of medicinal products in Ancona, a port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Today, Angelini Pharma is perhaps best known for two drugs: an anti-flu medication based on acetaminophen, called Tachipirina, launched in the 1950s that’s basically the Italian equivalent to Tylenol and is one of the top-selling medications in Italy; and trazodone, an antidepressant its researchers discovered in the 1960s that remains widely used.
Over the years, while other drug companies pushed the boundaries of science, Angelini made incremental innovations on its existing drugs. Meanwhile, the broader Angelini group made forays into unrelated areas, buying up a fragrance business in Spain and—this being Italy—wineries in Tuscany, where its Bertani Amarone della Valpolicella received a perfect 100-point rating from wine critic James Suckling. Francesco Angelini (Thea’s father), who had taken over the business in 1993 when his own father died, had engineered a number of these acquisitions.
“We decided we needed to rekindle the innovation story that had been here many years ago.“
Thea Paola Angelini, who received a degree in cell and molecular biology from Tor Vergata University in Rome, started her career conducting research at the company’s Santa Palomba laboratories. She has been president of Angelini Holding, the parent company of Angelini Industries, since June 2025.
She and Marullo di Condojanni met through a mutual friend in Rome. A lawyer with a PhD in domestic and international arbitration from Luiss Guido Carli University, he had previously been a law professor and a board member of Banca Aletti, the private banking arm of Banco BPM Group. After their marriage in 2017, he too joined the family firm. (They live in Rome and have three young children.)
In 2018, Thea’s father Francesco, then in his early 70s, transferred the controlling stake in the business to her. It got messy, fast. Thea’s older half-sister, Maria Gioella Angelini, accused her of exploiting an incapacitated person and asked the Court of Velletri to appoint a legal administrator to protect her father Francesco’s interests. The court dismissed her claims in September 2022. Angelini Industries, in a press release at the time, called it “a decree of definitive dismissal” that “sanctioned the groundlessness of the accusations.” The legal proceedings had “no impact” on the governance of Angelini Industries, the company said.
The fight played out publicly in the Italian press, with La Repubblica calling it “The Angelinis’ Dallas,” in reference to the TV series about a fictional wealthy oil family.
“It was painful,” Marullo di Condojanni says. “In the end, we came up with a solid capital structure and a shareholder in control. It ended up well, but the process was painful.”
With the fourth generation in control, Marullo di Condojanni refocused the European drug business on brain disorders. In 2021, Angelini Pharma bought Swiss biopharma company Arvelle Therapeutics for up to $960 million to get European rights to its anti-seizure drug for epilepsy, which is designed for adults whose seizures don’t respond to other treatments. More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from epilepsy, including some 6 million in Europe.
Then, in May 2025, Angelini acquired the non-U.S. rights for another drug that treats a rare, genetic version of epilepsy from New York City-based Grin Therapeutics for up to $570 million. Earlier this year, it announced a strategic research collaboration with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI drug-discovery startup Quiver Biosciences to work on novel therapeutics for genetic epilepsies.
“Strategically, we decided to double down on epilepsy and build on our legacy in brain health,” says Rafal Kaminski, Angelini’s chief scientific officer, who had previously worked at UCB Pharma in Belgium and Roche in Switzerland.
The scale of the Catalyst deal, at $4.1 billion, dwarfs those earlier acquisitions, giving Angelini a way into the rare disease market. With three commercial drugs in the market, it also immediately increased Angelini Pharma’s revenue by some $600 million — around 40%.
The biggest of Catalyst’s three commercial drugs is for a rare neuromuscular autoimmune disorder called Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome, or LEMS, which causes muscle weakness that can even make it difficult to breathe or swallow. The disease is brutal, but it affects just 2.8 million people worldwide and some 400 in the United States. Sales from the LEMS treatment accounted for two-thirds of Catalyst’s $149 million in revenue in the first quarter (ended March 31), before the acquisition.
With so few patients, rare diseases are a complex market. But that can create space for a new company to break in. Giant disease areas like cancer require big sales forces to bring a drug to market, making competition against pharma giants that can deploy such an army much more difficult. In rare diseases, there are few massive companies, the biggest being Vertex Pharmaceuticals (market cap: $134 billion). Marullo di Condojanni figures Angelini can gain a foothold—and expand from there.
The day after the Catalyst agreement was announced, Marullo di Condojanni gathered the leadership team at its Rome headquarters, which was renovated six years ago into a modern 320,000-square-foot complex with vertical green walls and gardens. “We were all expecting he would say, ‘Well done, we did a good job, and now we can relax,’” says Agnese Cattaneo, Angelini’s chief medical officer. “He said, ‘You did a great job, but you know guys, I want to be upfront with you. I think we need to do more.’”
That sounds more like a Silicon Valley CEO than the head of an Italian family business.