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/1515520
48 Illu s t r a t i o n : i S t o c k / S t u d i o M1 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 way it can deliver drugs to bone, which has long been a challenge for treating certain bone diseases. It also announced $15 mil- lion in funding. The accolades for that type of achieve- ment come fast and furious, but again, Polak doesn't hold back when describ- ing the reality of the situation. "It's a huge amount of work that has to come together for something to be good enough to go to people," he says. "So you post on social media and people say congrats. But you don't post all the shit you had to go through, and the personal suffering and the tradeoffs that you've made. I don't think I can go there, to be honest, but it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns." He does, however, give immense credit to the team of 10 employees, along with the many contractors and investors that helped Mesentech get to where it is. That last group includes CureDuchenne, a California non- profit focused on curing Duchenne muscu- lar dystrophy, one of the bone diseases that Polak and his team hope MES1022 might be able to help. "This business is kind of like being a frog and jumping from lily pad to lily pad in a swamp," says Polak. "Your job at any given time is not to get all the way to the end—we want to—but just to get to the next lily pad without falling in the swamp." The current lily pad is the first human trials, which will get Polak and his team plenty of valuable information about how the drug works. The next jump will be manufacturing the drug at scale, something Polak says they've already shown signs of being able to do. After that, he says, "there are different lily pads you can jump to. In Vancouver, we don't have vertically inte- grated pharmaceutical companies. Most Vancouver biotech companies—not all—end up being bought by bigger companies." Whatever the outcome, you can be sure that Polak will be straight up about it. "As the CEO of a company, your job is to be the rock—investors rely on you to always be there to pick up the pieces," he says. "If people see that you're also human, that can be hard. They don't want humans, they want superhumans. I don't know if they exist. There's lots of them on social media. I'm not a very good actor." —N.C. CHeCkS anD BalanCeS Meet HiBoop!, the new mental health startup founded by one of Victoria's most successful entrepreneurs