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.“........

© Forbes