B.C. biotech firms seek European exposure at Turin

They're host to a conference with their counterparts on the continent

By Jeff Lee
Vancouver Sun

January 21, 2006

B.C.'s biotech industry is hoping to gain some European exposure at a conference it is holding next week in Turin, Italy against the backdrop of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games.

Europe, with its diverse biotech sectors, is ripe for the collaborative research and investment opportunities B.C. can provide, Karimah Es Sabar, executive director of BC Biotech, said Friday.

The conference, which will inaugurate the $6 million BC-Canada Place facility in Turin, will attract more than 50 key players in Europe's established biotech industry, Es Sabar said.

"The world doesn't really know what the heck Canada does, let alone B.C.," Es Sabar said. "They don't even know we're number two in the world [as a biotech country.]"

B.C.'s biotech sector is the eight-largest in North America and the fastest-growing in Canada, though Quebec and Ontario have larger sectors, she said.

British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline Plc last year paid $1.7 billion for Vancouver-based ID Biomedical Corp., Canada's main supplier of flu vaccine Fluviral. Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, another Vancouver company, partnered with Boston Scientific Corp. and just received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market its patented drug-coated stent. The stent is a tiny wire-mesh tube used to keep plaque-congested heart vessels open.

And of course, QLT Inc., the senior citizen of B.C.'s industry, also from Vancouver, was first on the market in 2000 with a drug to treat age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease.

But B.C. just doesn't do a good enough job pointing out the great research and investment climate that exists in B.C., Es Sabar said.

"That's why we're taking people to talk about our economic excellence and our science and our industry. You can't talk about any one of these things in isolation."

On Monday, Economic Development Minister Colin Hansen will open British Columbia-Canada Place in Turin, which will be used over the duration of the Olympics as a meeting place for B.C. businesses. The facility's meeting rooms have already been booked for a number of events, the first of which is the two-day biotech conference.

BC Canada Place, which incorporates a log house built by 100 Mile House-based Sitka Log Homes, will also showcase products from 80 B.C. companies, including apparel manufacturers, wineries and suppliers.

Attending the biotech conference are a select group of B.C. scientists and company executives who will meet counterparts from Bavaria, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and a biotech group centred in Italy's Piedmont and Lombardi regions. They include researchers from the University of B.C. and the BC Cancer Agency, and executives from companies that have been spun off from research institutions.

One message Gordon McCauley hopes to deliver is that you don't have to have a B.C.-born company to take advantage of the province's growth in the biotech sector.

McCauley is CEO of Allon Therapeutics, a company involved in two human neuro-protection drug trials centred around Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment. Allon was licensed in 2001 to commercialize a collaborative research project between Israel's Tel Aviv University and the U.S. Institute of Health in Maryland. It began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange last year.

"It was pretty easy to make a compelling case that the company's place is here in B.C. because of the management and human resources infrastructure that is here. It is a really solid cluster," McCauley said.

"There are scientists all over the world, and there are clusters of scientific knowledge all over the world, but understanding the process by which you take very promising science and put it into a commercially reasonable and logical clinical development path and then move it forward down that path is a very specialized kind of knowledge."

B.C. has that knowledge, he said.

There are 93 companies in B.C. doing biotech research and development, employing more than 2,600 people.

Among those attending the conference are Don Avison, president of the University President's Council of B.C., Bob Sindelar of UBC's Centre for Drug Research and Development, Sam Abraham of the BC Cancer Agency, McCauley, and Andrew Rae, CEO of Ico Therapeutics.