By Shawn Lawrence
Innovator
Getting Cancer at the root of
One of the more interesting Canadian biotech stories of the 2013 calendar year took place back in April, when two Toronto-based companies, Stem Cell Therapeutics Corp. (SCT) and Trillium Therapeutics Inc. (Trillium), came together in a reverse merger transaction.
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t was interesting in the sense that the company undertaking the reverse takeover, Trillium, acquired all the assets of Stem Cell Therapeutics including its name. The real value of the deal however according to the man heading up this new entity as president and CEO, Dr. Niclas Stiernholm, is that it gave Trillium access to the public markets. “As Trillium, we were a private company that had survived for nearly a decade on venture capital investment and when that well dried up, we relied heavily on our licensing revenues,” says Stiernholm who for more than ten years was CEO of Trillium. No stranger to big transactions, one of the more famous licensing transactions involving Stiernholm and Trillium was with Genentech in 2004. “That was big news, and represented our first real accomplishment. It put us on the map, in newspapers and on television. We worked with Genentech for about four years and over the life of the agreement generated between five and six million dollars in licensing revenues. We established similar deals with other companies. In a way it brought some validation to our science and we learned a lot from these 22 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS November 2013
partnerships and how to develop products successfully. The downside of course was that we sold off some of our most precious assets because we were always in survival mode.” With a dwindling cash balance and increasing pressure from his investors, Stiernholm was left with two options to seek out new capital, one of which was to sell off another precious asset. Fortunately, that’s when SCT approached him about the possibility of the merger. “SCT had essentially two things to offer. Firstly, they had a public listing on the TSX venture exchange, which would provide access to public fundraising. Secondly, they had a positive cash balance. They had no staff, a pipeline that was virtually nonexistent, a part-time executive chair and no facility as they had closed down everything in Calgary, AB. It wasn’t so much an asset transaction as a financial one.” Some would call it an innovative solution to a problem that Canadian private biotech companies often face when considering the decision to go the Initial Public Offering (IPO) route. Specifically that the IPO route offers little certainty thanks to a volatile market with a shortage of available capital. “The merger was as such the best alterna-
