Spotlight on Québec By Shawn Lawrence
Through GSK partnership, NEOMED continues to redefine drug development
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aul Lirette still remembers the day he got word from GlaxoSmithKline’s head office that the company was pulling the plug on its R&D center in Laval, Québec. As more and more pharma companies globally look to externalize their R&D efforts, the closure of such facilities have become more common. While saddened by the news, he also felt a need to act. “I was determined as a GSK shareholder, employee and Québecois that we had to do all that we could to protect the excellent science in Québec, the high level of innovation, and the expertise we had built with our employees,” he recalls. As the president of GSK Canada Pharmaceuticals, Lirette knew that such a facility could be put to good use by the right people. At the top of this list was Max Fehlmann. It had only been two and half years since Fehlmann, with the help of Philippe Walker, had launched NEOMED, an organization who when AstraZeneca made its decision to close its research centre in Montréal, stepped into the facility and transformed it into a unique one-stop-shop for drug development. Moreover, as CEO and president, Fehlmann had in a short time positioned NEOMED as a key contributor to both the success and sustainability of the biopharmaceutical industry in Québec. Lirette’s hope was that NEOMED could do with GSK’s Laval site what it had done with the AstraZeneca R&D Centre. “We would talk from time-to-time about the great science resources gathered in Québec, and kick around various ideas to build
“The site has some of the best in class lab space for biologics, having been a North American leader in developing flu vaccines and antibodies.” — Paul Lirette
on this, and when I told him about my ideas for our facility, he was receptive and before long a new partnership was born.” The first announcement that the two sides would work together came in February 2015, and by April an official agreement was reached to repurpose the building into a new Biologics and Vaccine Centre of Excellence. The agreement included the lease and sublease of the facility to NEOMED and a framework for R&D collaboration between the two entities. This includes GSK paying the entire cost for leasing the facility for five years; representing an investment of $10 million. Additionally, the 66,000 sq. ft. facility would be transformed into a multi-tenant hub for independent, small and medium-sized enterprises focusing on the development of biologics and vaccines. Another caveat of the proposed partnership is that it will ensure that the expertise remains in Montreal. Specifically, it will allow
The Laval site was inaugurated in April 2015. The building has a total area of 70,000 square feet, 62% of which is directly available for research and development activities.
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Biotechnology Focus / August/September 2015
both the preservation of jobs and the eventual creation of new positions. Of GSK Laval’s 122 permanent employees, approximately 60 per cent have been transferred over to the new Centre of Excellence. “I’m very proud to say that we’ve been able to maintain more than half. At the original announcement in February the number was 50 percent so I could not be more thrilled it has grown,” says Lirette. He adds that people should stay tuned, because he believes the number of jobs in this partnership will continue to grow. Fehlmann says that for NEOMED, the timing of this opportunity couldn’t have been better. Having already filled the once vacant AstraZeneca R&D Centre with 23 independent small and medium-sized companies employing 175 people, he recognized the opportunity as a chance to do it all again. “For a while now we have needed to add a second top-class facility for research and development as we are completely full and have very long waiting list of potential tenants at our Saint Laurent site,” says Fehlmann. “Additionally, when we started NEOMED, it just happened that the Centre we inherited from AstraZeneca was completely equipped and dedicated to medicinal chemistry. We continued along that line and built everything according to that first specialization. Of course, we were missing the other part of the story in the life sciences value chain.” That other part pertains to the emergence of “biologics,” drugs that consist of giant molecules, hundreds of times the size of a conventional drug molecule, which are manufactured inside animal cells or micro-organisms such as bacteria as treatments for disease. He explains
