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/1477631
BCBUSINESS.CA SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 63 F U N F A C T S NA M E ON E T H I NG P E OP L E WOU L D B E S U R P R I S E D T O LEARN ABOUT YOU. I'm an avid rock climber. W H AT BU S I N E S S - P E R S ON D O YOU MO ST A DM I R E ? I admire Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. They're both incredibly successful individuals, but they do not seek personal recognition. W H AT O T H E R JOB M IG H T YOU H AV E H A D ? If I were blue-skying this, I would say race car driver. I am fasci- nated by the skill, the ability to remain calm under pressure (and at high speeds), and the sheer exhilaration of that job. Madden claims INEX was a very typical biotech firm in that it was reliant on capital investment to continue the work it was doing. Having been exposed to the "vagaries of the capital market" while he was with INEX, when the time came to launch Acuitas Therapeutics in 2009, Madden knew what he didn't want to do. "We wanted to be work- ing with partners who were supporting the work we were doing, allowing us to advance the technology and enabling them to move into the clinic," he says. Another thing that differenti- ated Acuitas from others in the industry was its focus on deliv- ery technology instead of prod- uct development: "There were lots of very exciting new types of therapeutics that were being developed based on biological molecules and they had huge potential, but they all needed delivery technology to allow them to work," says Madden. "When we started Acuitas, I really wanted us to [operate] as a pure technology company, advancing that delivery tech- nology and then working with as many partners as possible, providing our technology to them, to allow them to advance products into the clinic and the marketplace." But being a partnering com- pany ended up being a chal- lenge in itself: "If you're a bad partner, that model is going to crash and burn very quickly," Madden maintains. It's a mantra that he took to heart as Acuitas gradually built up strong partnerships that led to the firm's recent involve- ment in a project to save the world: developing a vaccine for COVID-19. low dose," Madden recalls. That's when the pandemic hit. By collaborating with BioN- Tech (another one of its own German partners), and Ameri- can multinational company Pfizer (which was working on a flu vaccine with BioNTech), Acuitas initiated the mission to apply the same technology used in the rabies vaccine in de- veloping a vaccine for COVID-19. Acuitas supported the scale up in the manufacture and production of the lipids needed to make billions of doses of the Comirnaty vaccine within a few months. People were working seven days a week, in shifts, both remotely and in-person. "One of the absolute pivotal moments was when the Phase 3 data was released, showing that the effectiveness of the vaccine was 95 percent," says Madden. "Everybody was just blown away by how well it worked, incredibly relieved that it was as effective as we'd hoped it might be, and incredibly proud of the fact that they've contrib- uted to this amazingly rapid development." It was a major win for the then-decade-old company, but the climb to the top was on a steep slope. Right around its inception, Acuitas was working with a pharmaceutical company to produce delivery systems for si RNA, which can prevent the production of a protein that's causing a disease. But a year after that partnership came to an end, Acuitas had only four months of cash left. An article on m RNA sparked Madden's curiosity. The deci- sion to start developing lipid nanoparticle (LNP) technology used for mRNA delivery was a big leap for the young firm, and in true entrepreneurial fashion, Madden took it. The leap paid dividends, be- cause in the last year and a half, based on its work with m RNA vaccines and therapeutics, Acuitas has doubled in size to reach a workforce of 55 people. With partners in the double digits, Acuitas is expanding from 5,273 square feet to a 12,000-square-foot lab and of- fice in the UBC campus. While some of its partners are inter- ested in mRNA vaccines, a large number of them are developing vaccines against historically indelible diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV. "We're very excited that the versatility of the mRNA ap- proach may allow us to develop more effective vaccines for these really challenging diseas- es," Madden maintains. "The other big area that we're sup- porting is gene editing. There's lots of companies looking at providing technologies that can correct for genetic defects that will allow people that have a genetic disorder to live more normal lives." —R.R. E N T R E P R E N E U R O F T H E Y E A R 2 0 2 2 "The other big area that we're supporting is gene editing. There's lots of companies looking at providing technologies that can correct for genetic defects that will allow people that have a genetic disorder to live more normal lives." Getting involved in the pro- duction of the Pfizer vaccine was part luck, part timing and part innovation. Acuitas had previously partnered with a German company, CureVac, to provide delivery technology for an m RNA vaccine against ra- bies. "The data from that early clinical study was released in January 2020, showing that the vaccine provided a re- ally strong immune response against rabies, at a remarkably