For over a hundred years, the Angelini family had been perfectly content to stay in their lane. From their elegant headquarters in Rome, they ran a comfortable, largely European business empire: pharmaceuticals—including the Italian equivalent of Tylenol and the widely used antidepressant trazodone—alongside a robotics outfit, a handful of wineries, and a joint venture with Procter & Gamble to sell Pampers across Italy. It was a classic, low-key family enterprise, the kind that generates steady cash without making headlines. But in 2017, when former banker and law professor Sergio Marullo di Condojanni married Thea Paola Angelini, the family’s fourth-generation controlling shareholder, the quiet empire began to stir. The couple started dreaming together, imagining a future far beyond the old world, and by 2024 they had fixed their gaze on the largest, most innovative pharmaceutical market in the world: the United States. “What was clear from the beginning is that the U.S., in the pharmaceutical space, is mandatory,” Marullo di Condojanni, now 48, told Forbes. Last November, he found his target: Catalyst Pharmaceuticals, a Coral Gables, Florida-based biotech focused on rare diseases. During a meeting with Catalyst’s CEO Rich Daly at the swanky Chancery Rosewood hotel on London’s Grosvenor Square—once the U.S. embassy—Marullo di Condojanni turned on the charm. “He’s very Italian—dressed to the nines,” Daly recalled. They bonded instantly over their shared philosophy of drug development and the surprising way their companies fit together: Catalyst worked on rare neurological and neuromuscular diseases in America, while Angelini tackled brain disorders like epilepsy and depression across Europe. By May, with support from Blackstone and Italy’s CDP Equity, Angelini Pharma agreed to pay $4.1 billion in cash for Catalyst, a hefty premium to its market value. The deal closed in July, and with it, the Italian firm catapulted into the U.S. and the rare-disease arena, a move that would forever change the family’s trajectory.
Despite its obscurity in America, Angelini has a storied history in Italy. Before the Catalyst acquisition, Angelini Pharma generated $1.5 billion in revenue, making it the crown jewel of the family’s broader group, Angelini Industries, which pulled in roughly $2.5 billion in total revenue last year. Forbes now estimates that Thea Paola Angelini and her family are worth around $10 billion. At just 39 years old, she is the controlling shareholder, though her father, Francesco Angelini, now 80, still retains a minority stake and certain economic rights in her majority position. Family-owned businesses often stumble by the third generation; far fewer survive and thrive into the fourth. But Thea—whose attention is mostly devoted to the family’s philanthropic work and who declined to speak with Forbes—and her husband had ambitions that reached far beyond running a sleepy company that churned out cash from drugs invented in the 1950s and 1960s. “We decided we needed to rekindle the innovation story that had been here many years ago,” Marullo di Condojanni said. He wasn’t just talking about buying Catalyst. The group also created its own small venture fund, seeded with $350 million, to invest in promising life-sciences startups like Switzerland-based Nouscom, which is developing a cancer vaccine. It was a striking pivot for an Italian company, where tradition and caution usually rule. Italy’s economy is dominated by family firms, and most remain stubbornly focused on Europe. “The new generation was more ambitious,” said Alessandro Zattoni, a professor of strategy at Luiss Business School in Rome, who wrote a case study on the Angelini family business. “Entrepreneurs are starting to change the traditional move that you stay in Europe, you stay in Italy. Coming to the States is not easy, but if you succeed you have a huge market.”
The Angelini story began back in December 1919, when Francesco Angelini—Thea’s great-grandfather—was a 32-year-old pharmacist in Ancona, a port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He launched a small business producing and selling medicinal products, and from those humble roots grew a pharmaceutical empire. Today, Angelini Pharma is best known for two drugs: Tachipirina, an anti-flu medication based on acetaminophen that launched in the 1950s and is essentially the Italian answer to Tylenol—a top-selling medication across Italy—and trazodone, an antidepressant discovered by its own researchers in the 1960s that remains widely prescribed worldwide. While other drug companies pushed the boundaries of science, Angelini for decades made incremental improvements on its existing products, content to harvest what it had already sown. Meanwhile, the broader Angelini group ventured into unrelated territories, snapping up a fragrance business in Spain and, because this is Italy, wineries in Tuscany. Its Bertani Amarone della Valpolicella earned a perfect 100-point rating from wine critic James Suckling, a point of pride in a portfolio that was already eclectic. Thea’s father, Francesco, who took over the business in 1993 after his own father died, masterminded many of these acquisitions. Thea herself studied cell and molecular biology at Tor Vergata University in Rome and began her career doing research at the company’s Santa Palomba laboratories. She has served as president of Angelini Holding, the parent company of Angelini Industries, since June 2025. Her husband Sergio, a lawyer with a PhD in domestic and international arbitration from Luiss Guido Carli University, had previously taught law and sat on the board of Banca Aletti, the private banking arm of Banco BPM Group. The couple met through a mutual friend in Rome, married in 2017, and soon after, Sergio joined the family firm. They still live in Rome and are raising three young children.
The transition to the fourth generation was not smooth. In 2018, Francesco, then in his early seventies, transferred his controlling stake in the business to Thea. Almost immediately, things turned ugly. Thea’s older half-sister, Maria Gioella Angelini, accused her of exploiting an incapacitated person and asked a court to appoint a legal administrator to protect their father’s interests. The court dismissed her claims in September 2022, and Angelini Industries issued a press release calling the ruling “a decree of definitive dismissal” that “sanctioned the groundlessness of the accusations.” The legal proceedings, the company insisted, had “no impact” on governance. But the fight played out painfully in the Italian press, where La Repubblica nicknamed it “The Angelinis’ Dallas,” after the famous television series about a feuding, fictional oil family. “It was painful,” Marullo di Condojanni admitted. “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.” What emerged from that turmoil was a more focused, more ambitious company. With the fourth generation fully in control, Marullo di Condojanni redirected the European drug business toward brain disorders, doubling down on neuroscience. In 2021, Angelini Pharma bought Swiss biopharma company Arvelle Therapeutics for up to $960 million to secure European rights to an anti-seizure drug for epilepsy, 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, so the market potential was enormous. Then, in May 2025, Angelini acquired the non-U.S. rights to another drug treating a rare, genetic form of epilepsy from New York City-based Grin Therapeutics for up to $570 million. Earlier this year, the company announced a strategic research collaboration with Quiver Biosciences, an AI-driven drug-discovery startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on novel therapies for genetic epilepsies. “Strategically, we decided to double down on epilepsy and build on our legacy in brain health,” said Rafal Kaminski, Angelini’s chief scientific officer, who previously worked at UCB Pharma and Roche.
The Catalyst acquisition, at $4.1 billion, dwarfed all those earlier deals. It gave Angelini a direct entry into the lucrative and complex rare-disease market, and with three commercial drugs already on the market, it immediately boosted Angelini Pharma’s revenue by around $600 million—a jump of roughly 40 percent. Catalyst’s flagship drug treats Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome, or LEMS, a rare neuromuscular autoimmune disorder that causes muscle weakness so severe it can make breathing and swallowing difficult. The disease is brutal, but it affects only a tiny patient population—just a few hundred people in the United States. Sales from the LEMS treatment accounted for two-thirds of Catalyst’s $149 million in revenue in the first quarter, before the acquisition. Rare diseases like LEMS are a peculiar market. With so few patients, there is no room for a massive sales force, no blockbuster potential in the traditional sense. But for a newcomer like Angelini, that’s precisely what makes it attractive. Treating common diseases like cancer requires huge armies of salespeople and expensive marketing campaigns, making it nearly impossible to compete with pharmaceutical giants that can deploy those resources effortlessly. In rare diseases, by contrast, the competition is thinner, and the largest player, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, has a market cap of $134 billion—big, but not untouchable. Marullo di Condojanni figured Angelini could carve out a foothold and expand from there. The day after the Catalyst deal was announced, he gathered his leadership team at Angelini’s Rome headquarters, a stunning 320,000-square-foot complex renovated six years ago with vertical green walls and gardens. The mood was celebratory. “We were all expecting he would say, ‘Well done, we did a good job, and now we can relax,’” recalled Agnese Cattaneo, Angelini’s chief medical officer. Instead, he turned to them and said, “You did a great job, but you know guys, I want to be upfront with you. I think we need to do more.”
Those words sound more like something a Silicon Valley CEO might say than the head of an Italian family business. But that is exactly the point. Marullo di Condojanni and Thea Paola Angelini are deliberately breaking the old mold. For generations, Italian dynasties have been content to protect what they inherited, staying safe and static. The Angelinis, by contrast, are embracing risk, global ambition, and innovation. They are betting that a centuries-old family firm can still transform itself into a modern, science-driven pharmaceutical player. The Catalyst acquisition is not a final destination; it is a platform for further growth. With the venture fund, the AI collaboration, and the pipeline of epilepsy treatments, the family is building a new identity for Angelini Pharma. And while the U.S. market is notoriously difficult for European companies to crack, the rewards are undeniable. “If you succeed you have a huge market,” as professor Zattoni observed. Marullo di Condojanni clearly believes he can succeed. He has quietly turned an old-world company into a transatlantic challenger, one with a foothold in rare diseases and a sharp focus on brain health. The passion is personal as much as professional. He and Thea have staked their family legacy on this gamble, and after enduring a painful public family feud, they emerged with a clearer vision. Now they are moving forward with confidence, refusing to rest on the laurels of Tachipirina and trazodone. The message from Rome is unmistakable: the Angelini family is no longer content to be Europe’s quiet secret. They want to be a force in the world’s most important pharmaceutical market—and they are prepared to do whatever it takes to get there. As Marullo di Condojanni told his team, they did a great job. But there is more to be done, and the family is just getting started.
