Hitting the ground running in 2017!

Well, 2017 is now very firmly with us, and it's shaping up to be another very interesting year ahead! Personally speaking, this is the beginning of my fifth year at AmorChem, and while it is true to say that occasionally it still feels like yesterday, a lot of water has flowed under my bridge in that time corresponding with a lot of new challenges faced, much new experience gained, and many solid lessons learned - and that's what it's all about! 

This is a big, big year for us at AmorChem, having reached the end of the investment cycle of our first fund, and various key projects now having matured from early stage discovery assets into those that are increasingly the focus of business development (BD) activities, garnering enthusiasm from BD personnel working for various potential external partners. This is both an exciting as well as rewarding development in that it underlines that we must be doing something right - right?!

We are poised to do it again this year, bigger and better, having learned a lot about the complexities and challenges in investing in life science discovery projects that remain housed in the laboratories of inventors. This experience is fairly unique to us (province-wide if not Canada-wide), and the need for such translational funding isn't going away anytime soon, so this is why we are ideally positioned to expand on our success and therefore are currently fundraising for an AmorChem 2. 

We weren't totally sure at the outset or early on during the vesting period of our first round whether the submission of new opportunities and deal flow would significantly slow down after 3-4 years, or would be sustained. While it's always easy to be cynical or pessimistic, we were in on the inside, busier each passing year, with confidence that the need for our presence in the local ecosystem was not about to dry up. And guess what - it didn't!

In fact, our thermometer remained on the warmer side consistently, and it is accurate to say that the door has never really stopped knocking. Word of mouth has spread about our fund and what we do, and increasingly, people come to us now in a fashion typified by classical inbound marketing campaigns. This trend has been facilitated by our annual KNOCK OUT™ competition, whereby local hopefuls enter the ring in front of our panel of biopharma heavyweights and duke it out for a chance at a grand prize of a $500,000 AmorChem investment. The quantity and quality of our applicants has steadily improved and last year we found ourselves in the somewhat luxurious (bot not enjoyable!) position of having to turn down projects that were just a little too early - even for us. 

The take-home message here is that demand remains high, the need for external funds to get early stage projects across the "valley of death" is deeper than ever (like the valley itself) , and it is apparent that academic granting agencies can only do so much in this regard. You only have to mention the acronym "CIHR" to researchers young and old, to be hit with a barrage of tales of woe about lack of funding or even basic trust in the process. This is why we exist, and I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that the need for our continued existence is palpable - given the number of calls we receive from local tech transfer offices asking about our rumoured next round of financing, with a hot new project to put forward for it - it's more than evident that we meet a key, urgent need. 

As exciting a time as it is for us, 2017 presents many challenges in the life science and pharma sector, and recent or upcoming elections can be expected to impact those challenges further. Here in Canada, we have Justin Trudeau as a newly elected Prime Minister, representing a shift of government from Conservative to Liberal, while south of the border, we have had the raucous (and occasionally trainwreck) presidential campaign trail that ultimately saw the Trumpster seeing off Obama and the Dems. 

One currently red hot drug development area is the immuno-oncology space, which saw some record-breaking fundraising and dealmaking in 2016. Perhaps most prominent are companies like Juno, Kite, Cellectis, Bluebird, and making the news more recently was the UK's Immunocore,  which scored a European record-breaking financing round of $320M for their T-cell-mediated attack approach on cancer. This type of huge fundraising is reminiscent of North American record-breaking rounds such as Cambridge's (MA) Moderna, which raised a whopping $450M in 2015 for their mRNA therapeutic approach. In fact, since 2011, Moderna has raised an amount just shy of $1B, which is staggering. 

Speaking of immunotherapy, AmorChem bought into this overall approach early on, having invested in a personalised cancer immunotherapy program that uses minor histocompatibility antigens (MiHAs) as T-cell targets in cancer. This exciting program is about to enter Phase I clinical trials here in Canada, and we are already fielding multiple inquiries from potential partners who see the huge potential in the approach, and we are optimistic that the future for MiHA-directed immunotherapy is looking very bright indeed. This year should see new, susbtamtial investment in the assets of this program and for updates on that, watch this space!

Things look optimistic in spite of various challenges the pharma industry faces; such issues will probably sort themselves out in the coming year or so, once corporations find out exactly who and how the next President is, in a business sense. Having said that, an industry with a global revenue stream in the hundreds of billions of dollars (and predicted to be in the trillions before very long!) is a juggernaut that barrels forward with considerable force, and even lawmakers can only hope to do so much to slow it down. Time will tell on the outcome of big pharma pricing wars and the increasing accusations of price gouging from the public, payers and governments alike. Until then, let's stay optimistic and look forward to an amazing 2017 ahead!