To be successful in the pharmaceutical industry, leaders must be willing to take risks. During his conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive, Leonard Mazur kept coming back to this point. According to Mazur, today the CEO of Citius Pharmaceuticals, Inc., it’s something he’s learned again and again throughout his career.

“In the pharma industry, people don’t realize that they are risk-takers in undertaking drug development, especially at the preclinical stage,” says Mazur, also the board chairman at Citius, a New Jersey-based biopharma. “You’re at the ultimate level of risk-taking, given the high percentage of failures.”

Mazur continues, “You have to be comfortable with risk to be able to do that, but, in building an organization, you don’t necessarily have to have people that are risk-takers throughout the entire organization. What you must have is a balance between a risk-averse side and the risk-taking side. That balance is important, because I’ve found that the people who are really professional, who really know what they’re doing, they’ll make sure that the way everything gets executed is done correctly.”

Mazur’s emphasis on balance reflects a broader leadership principle that he has refined over time. While visionaries and innovators push the boundaries of what is possible, methodical operators ensure that systems, compliance, and processes remain intact. In his experience, the most effective teams are those where these perspectives coexist and challenge one another constructively, preventing both stagnation and chaos.

He also has a positive view on regulatory agencies, such as the FDA. While he doesn’t always agree with the decisions they make, he’s spent his career building positive relationships with these agencies.

According to the veteran entrepreneur, they are not a barrier or obstacle that must be passed. This collaborative outlook, Mazur believes, is essential not only for regulatory success but also for maintaining public trust. He notes that pharmaceutical leaders must remember that regulators, like industry professionals, are ultimately focused on patient safety and outcomes.

“We’re in a regulated industry, and the FDA is not your enemy. They’re your partner,” he says.

A random walk with impactful results

Mazur, the child of Ukrainian parents who immigrated to the US from Germany, grew up in Philadelphia. He served in the US Marine Corps Reserve while studying at Temple University for his undergraduate degree. He would earn his MBA from Temple’s Fox School of Business as well.

From there, Mazur joined a company called Cooper Laboratories, an opportunity, he says, thatmaterialized completely by accident.

“I call it the random walk after you graduate; I was a liberal arts graduate, and that random walk took me to Cooper Labs to start out in sales, like a lot of us do in the in the industry,” Mazur explains. “Ultimately, [Cooper Labs] made 150 acquisitions over the period that they were in business, and as a result, they were just rapidly growing. I went for my MBA while I was starting out in the salesforce. It turned out to be a fortuitous move.”

Within two years, Mazur found himself promoted to the role of market research analyst. During that time period, as the pace of acquisitions at Cooper Labs increased, the companydecided to reorganize the business around medical specialties. As Mazur continued to climb through the career ladder into product management, he eventually found himself promoted into strategic planning and acquisitions. He was assigned to a small ophthalmological business unit, where he led the first acquisition of a contact lens solutions company.

“I put together the very first strategic plan to expand the business,” he tells Pharm Exec. “The objective was to grow this ophthalmic business into a significant company. At that time, we thought we could grow but that it would be a big task just to get it to $50 million. What we did was to redefine the whole business. Instead of being an ophthalmic pharmaceutical company, we decided that it would become an eye care company, and it would acquire everything and anything related to the ophthalmologist and the optometrist.”

According to Mazur, the technology in that market segment was exploding, and innovations such as phacoemulsification, extended wear lenses, and other products were impacting the market. Hence, such growth, Mazur adds, made it an opportune time to spin off the ophthalmology group into its own companythat would be named Cooper Vision.

Mazur says that the new company grew to become a significant player in that market. From there, Mazur was assigned to create a dermatology-focused business for Cooper Labs.

“Believe it or not, we had Aveeno as our cornerstone brand,” he says, citing the longtime dermatologist-endorsed skincare brand.

Mazur notes another expansion exampleat the time, one he says he “didn’t have anything to do with, but I’m going to cite it because I think it’s a great example of that Cooper strategy.”

“Cooper formed a dental business, and they went out and acquired a tiny little toothbrush company doing less than $1 million in revenue at the time called Oral-B,” he adds. “It became the world’s largest-selling toothbrush.”

Mazur would spend 10 years as part of Cooper Labs. “I have to say, it was formative for me because of the opportunity to be at a company where things are growing like that,” he says. “They gave you the platform to identify growth opportunities and bring them to fruition. I learned to do deals and how to exit. I went through all of those experiences, along with launching products and drugs. I had just about every experience that you wanted to have that was possible back in those days.”

A once-in-a-lifetime experience

Mazur says that his experiences at Cooper Labs shaped his leadership style. He learned what it took to take an idea, understand the risk, and then see that it gets executed properly.

He adds, “From there, I went to BASF, to its Knoll Pharmaceuticals subsidiary as a director of marketing and participated in the launching of a little drug called Vicodin. I also worked on the launch of one of the very first calcium channel blockers in the US market. I stayed there for a couple years and went out to the west coast for ICN Pharmaceuticals, which ultimately morphed into Valiant and Bausch Health.”

However, one of the most impactful moments of Mazur’s career was still ahead of him. He would go on to launch the first antiviral drug for the treatment of respiratory syncytial virus, a disease that posed a serious risk to infants. Infection can spread from a pregnant mother to the fetus in utero and can be deadly, particularly for newborns that are immunocompromised.

“When this drug was introduced,” Mazar says, “it was the very first one that actually treated that disease in infants. In those days, we would get calls, letters, and thank-you-notes from parents, doctors, and nurses. They really, truly appreciated what this drug was doing, which was saving infants’ lives.

“I remember telling our team at the time that they’d likely never get this kind of experience again. It’ll be a rarity. And I was right about that, but it shows the benefit of being in this business,” he continues. “This is one of the few businesses where you actually have an impact on the lives of other human beings, and it’s usually a very positive impact. People in this business have to stop and think about that, because it’s very important to know the role that you’re playing and the benefit you’re providing to society at large. The industry gets a bad rap, but we’re all living a lot longer these days because of our industry.”

Taking the leap

Following his time out west, Mazur and his wife moved from Orange County, CA, to New Jersey. He jokes that he did so because his wife disliked paradise, although he does describe New Jersey as beautiful. Initially, Mazur worked as an executive at a pharma startup, Medicis Pharmaceuticals, where he says he was able to take a generic drug, brand it, and turn it into a sales success. While the company took off and Mazur stayed for a few years, he eventually decided to make a major decision.

“I decided then to go off on my own and become an entrepreneur at the age of 50,” he tells Pharm Exec. “That is one of the worst ages that you can do something like that because you’ve got everything to lose. However, I’ve always been a great believer in being all in. I started a dermatology platform company called Genesis Pharmaceutical. I didn’t have venture capital backing, and I had nothing. I had zero, so I learned what it meant to go from zero. My motto, in those days, and ever since has been ‘failure is not an option.’ Ultimately, the company thrived. I was able to acquire some drugs, along with a small company out of Detroit that had an interesting cosmetic-type drug. It was a product that could be sold directly in offices. That’s how I really got started.”

After a couple years, Genesis was acquired by Pierre Fabre, one of France’s largest pharma companies. “I became its US CEO for about two years, until I decided to go off on my own again,” says Mazur.

These experiences reinforced his belief that true entrepreneurship requires personal stake. By investing his own capital, Mazur ensured alignment between leadership decisions and long-term outcomes, a principle he continues to prioritize in subsequent ventures.

The German native would go on to form several revenue producing pharmaceutical companies with successful exists and team up with former president of Roche Labs Myron Holubiak to form a research-based company called Leonard-Meron Biosciences. The goal was to transition the business from development stage to revenue producing. Mazur describes this as an entirely different experience where he could leverage his commercial skills.

“We put our own money in, and that’s another degree of separation here for myself compared to most other companies. We have invested significant funds of our own capital into the company,” Mazar notes. “That goes back to my earlier days when I was starting out, where I ultimately had to put up my house and other things in order to keep the company, survive, and make it.”

Leonard-Meron Biosciences would eventually merge with Citius in March 2016.

“That provided us with greater access to the capital markets to develop Mino-Lok, our antibiotic lock solution for the treatment of infected catheters,” Mazur tells Pharm Exec. “We have since spun-out Citius Oncology into a separate publicly traded company in order to commercialize Lymphir, our FDA-approved therapeutic for the treatment of patients with a rare form of cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL).”

Positioned for growth

Citius is in the process of launching Lymphir in the US. The novel immunotherapy treats relapsed or refractory CTCL and is indicated for use in Stage I-III disease after at least one prior systemic therapy.

“This upcoming quarter, we’ll start putting the salespeople on board,” Mazur says. “We’ve identified where all the treaters are for this cancer. It’s a rare cancer with roughly 3,000 patients throughout the US. The market for our type of drug, which is an infusion drug, is about $400 million [annually] at this point. But new entrants that come into this market increase the market, which makes it positive.”

Lymphir is a recombinant fusion protein that combines the IL-2 receptor binding domain with diphtheria toxin to directly kill malignant T-cells. Its approval marked the first new systemic therapy for CTCL in more than seven years.

Citius’s pipeline includes anti-infectives in adjunct cancer care, oncology, stem cell therapy, and unique prescription products.

“What I’m proud of with our company is the people that we have on board,” Mazur tells Pharm Exec. “We’ve got a great team, and they know how to execute.”