A bitter biotech brew fermenting into something sweeter - it just needed time!

The word "biotech" of late, while not exactly being a dirty or unholy word by any means, certainly was one which was considered out of time or out of fashion here in the province of Quebec, since 2008 effectively. While there were a myriad of reasons (and even more excuses) for that, the bottom line was that biotech in the Montreal area just didn't work out and the windows were shuttered one after the other, province-wide. Yes, there were one or two noted exceptions, but that didn't save the industry. 

Now if you have never opened a biotech company and then presided over its closing and subsequent gutting of its laboratory and office spaces, then it might be easier to just look at it as a real estate deal gone south. But as someone charged with getting a shiny new but empty space turned into a fully functional modern laboratory facility, and then years later being charged with emptying it out and selling off the parts at firesale-type prices, well, I've been there and done that and would prefer not to live that experience again!

Yes, yes, entrepreneurs have to embrace failure, blah blah, and learn from it, uh huh, but in almost every case of an entrepreneur failing, there are a whole bunch of individuals who by association (and loyalty) must fail alongside them, even after doing their jobs diligently over many dedicated years. The ~350 employees just let go by Theranos, for example, surely know how that feels, today. It's the least fun side of what is typically a brutal business (biotech life) - with what seems like a >95% chance of failure, almost all of the time - even when it's going well!

So why would we at AmorChem even be considering branching out into that milieu once more, after having tasted the bitter brew of biotech business in the past, in previous funds? Well, there is that mantra of "if at first you don't succeed" and of embracing failure, and, of course, the key element of embracing failure is learning from it, and then coming back bigger, better and stronger. Unquestionably, we have learnt valuable lessons from previous endeavours, as have other players in the local ecosystem who are already embracing a return to biotech - 2016 style!

Without going into the details of what went wrong in the business, historically, (there's not enough space in one blog to go into it all!) to cut a long story short we continue to need a vehicle of sorts to nurture and mature our most promising projects. Given that we are a very early-stage life science venture fund, it is completely legitimate to say that 18-24 months of our support rarely leads to that big pharma deal and the much sought after exit for both ourselves as well as our own investors. 

Rather, our support over the typical lifespan of our university-incubated projects leads to a clearer picture regarding which technologies have evolved, and which are ready for further elaboration into a structure that both permits additional investment/development and adds a degree of professionalisation to the team, whilst earmarking the venture as a commercially viable candidate for acquisition. 

It's not as obvious as it may seem to convert what was an entirely academic project and team into a biotech company (real or virtual), as anyone who has lived that experience knows well. But we have made the decision that for chosen exciting technologies which are coupled with talented teams, we will move them forward into their very own (more or less) virtual entities that will be responsible for subsequent development of those technologies towards commercialisation and the marketplace. 

Ergo, and to wit, the recent nucleation and creation of Mperia Therapeutics which arose out of a stellar effort over many years at the University of Montreal, under the auspices of Professor Huy Ong (pictured above) and his dedicated roster of collaborators and researchers. This new entity is being led by local life science serial entrepreneur, Maxime Ranger, who has passionately stepped into the fray to take Dr. Ong's azapeptide technology (focused on age-dependent macular degeneration, for now) to the next level. We wish them the very best and are behind them 100%.

We are not done yet though, and without giving too much away, we have other select technologies from our portfolio that we intend to proceed similarly, some of which have already grabbed attention from local VCs in terms of them joining us in financing such further evolution into the biotech space. There will be more news on that as it happens, but for sure one lesson we have learned is to keep things virtual as long as possible, and spend the money on actual experimentation rather than on infrastructure and top-heavy management teams. 

In many ways this is a continuation of our modus operandi since the debut of AmorChem, whereby we incubated our projects where they began, i.e. in founder's laboratories - to apply maximal funds to pure research - and the interest in the local ecosystem for some of our currently being-positioned newcos is testament to the success of that approach. Mperia was first, but there are others to follow - watch this space!