With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
BCBUSINESS.CA B I O T E C H N O L O G Y A Higher St and ard In the U.S. alone, as many as 135,000 people suffer from lupus nephritis (LN), a complication of the autoimmune disease lupus. Help- ing that group manage LN, which leads to chronic and potentially life- threatening inflammation of the kidneys, could be just the start for Aurinia Pharmaceuticals. At press time, the Victoria-based com- pany was awaiting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's potential January approval of voclosporin. In the first successful global Phase 3 clinical trials for a new LN drug, this oral treatment proved significantly more effective than mycophenolate, or CellCept, the unapproved U.S. standard of care. "Our expectation is approval for a drug that will change the paradigm for these patients suffering from lupus nephritis," says co-founder and chief business officer Michael Martin. Martin and chief medical officer Neil Solomons previously worked at Victoria's Aspreva Pharmaceuticals, where they played a role in develop- ing CellCept. In 2012, four years after Swiss pharma giant Galenica bought Aspreva for $915 million, they and colleague Larry Mandt spun off Aurinia. "We saw an opportunity to find a drug that we could layer on top of that therapy," Martin recalls. Their addition: voclosporin, commonly used in renal transplants. Through a reverse merger with Edmonton-based Isotechnika Pharma the following year, Aurinia secured the worldwide rights to voclosporin and a listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Since that deal, the company, which now trades on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange as well as the TSX, has raised about US$640 million. LN is called an orphan disease because it affects fewer than 200,000 Americans. Aurinia president and CEO Peter Greenleaf, a pharma- ceuticals industry veteran who took the helm in early 2019 and usually splits his time between Victoria and Maryland, says the company plans to start with the U.S. market. To that end, Aurinia has been hiring stateside as it makes the Washington, D.C., area its commercial hub. In Decem- ber, it announced an agreement with Tokyo-headquartered Otsuka Phar- maceutical Co. to bring voclosporin to Japan and Europe. But as Greenleaf stresses, 265-employee Aurinia is still very much a Canadian business, with its entire R&D team in Victoria. As part of its mission to combat autoimmune disease, the Dan Burgar doesn't think brick-and-mortar retail will ever disappear. But long before the COVID-19 pandemic furthered Amazon.com's devastation of traditional business practices, Burgar was arguing that retail would be one of the many sectors disrupted by virtual and aug- mented reality ( VR/AR). Having worked at various local tech companies, the Vancouver native became enamoured with this burgeon- ing industry and founded the city's VR/AR Association in 2016. (According to that group, Vancouver is now the second- largest VR/AR ecosystem in the world—behind Silicon Valley, unsurprisingly.) Burgar, who's been a leading voice for the technology in B.C., launched his own company, Shape Immersive, a few years later. Shape's goal is to disrupt and transform the way retail- ers think, he says. "Right now with COVID, people aren't able to go into physical locations to view products, so we're essentially giving the potential customer the ability to shop in 3D at home." To that end, Shape has partnered with fashion brands like Nike and Mulberry to help customers visualize products without seeing them in person. "We try to dig into the brands' core focus and how we can help them envision their road map within 3D and VR/AR," Burgar explains. "These com- panies are realizing quickly that they need to engage a bit more deeply with consumers in this post-pandemic world." No wonder Burgar expects the next few years to be fertile for VR/AR. As a sign of this coming expansion, he points to a report by U.S. firm Global Market Insights that worldwide spending by retailers on AR visualization will hit US$50 billion by 2024. There's also the rumoured 2022 release of Apple's VR glasses. "That's going to change the game," Burgar says of the latter. "Apple takes the wait-and-see approach; they don't tend to jump right into being leaders or innovators at the start. They always jump in when they're ready and when they have something that can completely shift the game, and we're all waiting for that." He also believes that his own company, which has about 20 staff, will see rapid growth soon. "We expect to be on a major hiring spree," Bur- gar says. "Our 3D development team and artists will need to increase as, over the next six to 12 months, everything on the retail technology side starts exploding." –N.C. V R / A R Tak ing S hap e company also launched trials of a voclosporin ophthalmic solution for dry eye, which afflicts millions of people worldwide. After suspend- ing work on that treatment last fall, though, Aurinia is focused on lupus nephritis. "Our goal is going to be to get this drug launched successfully, become a fully integrated pharma company, not just a development- stage pharma company, and then alongside of that, to continue to build our pipeline," Greenleaf says. –N.R. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 BCBUSINESS 37 PHARMA HAND Peter Greenleaf leads autoimmune disease drug maker Aurinia