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PETER HOLST slow, expensive route of developing their own drugs. Only about one in 20 drugs gets approved, and the process typically takes a decade and costs $1 billion, mostly thanks to clinical trials. "We work upstream of that," Hansen says. "Our company is set up so that we can engage with a partner, which could be a large pharma or biotech company, and they have an idea, they have an insight from biology, they've got an innovation that defines what a therapeutic would look like. Then we take that idea and we apply our technology to help get to the actual drug, the composition of matter, faster and more efficiently." AbCellera's partners pay it a little up front, but if a drug gets approved, it shares in the revenue. Rather than bet on one treatment, the company is building a portfolio of hun- dreds of stakes "so that we can get a diversified share of the next generation of antibody therapeutics that have come from the platform," Hansen notes. "He's got that win-win men- tality all the time," Lecault says. "He does not view the world as a zero-sum game, and the way he approaches problems is always from the perspective of, How can we bring the most value to the world?" AbCellera, which funded itself for several years mostly through payments from research discovery partner- ships, didn't take its first venture capital financing until 2018. Early last year, it followed that $10-million raise by closing $105 million in private funding. To help AbCellera scale, Hansen wanted to take the company public. He originally thought that would happen in 2022 or 2023, giving it time to validate its platform and get antibody therapies into the clinic. "With the pandemic, it just happened that all those things occurred in rapid fire right after the financing." So AbCellera debuted on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange last December, raising some US$550 million in the largest- ever initial public offering by a Canadian biotech firm. "The combination of timing and market and momentum, we decided to pull the trigger," Hansen says of the IPO, which made him a billionaire. In the medium term, AbCellera plans to complete the project it started in 2012, he explains. That includes grow- ing its workforce of about 330 and building new local facili- ties, among them a manufac- turing site—the first of its kind in Canada—that lets it produce therapeutic antibodies for clini- cal trials. "All of that's happen- ing here in Vancouver," Hansen says. "At the end of that, we will have assembled the world's most versatile, fastest and most powerful engine for identifying new drugs of this particular class." –N.R. SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 53 BUSINESS SCIENTIST Hansen led AbCellera's rise to biotech powerhouse