Spotlight on Québec
québec
By Shawn Lawrence
The Neomed Institute:
A one stop shop for drug development The news was very bad for the Québec life science industry in February, 2012, when global pharma giant AstraZeneca announced it was closing its research facility in Québec. The province was already facing huge job loss numbers in the sector as one-by-one, global biopharmaceutical giants were moving or scaling back their R&D operations in Québec. Who would have thought back then that the former AstraZeneca building in the Saint-Laurent technology park would ever see better days again. And yet, that is exactly what has happened over the past 18 months. Thanks to the launch of the NEOMED Institute, there is a research renaissance happening in Québec’s biopharmaceutical community. Hailed as a new type of translational research centre, the NEOMED Institute is part of a major shift in philosophy for life sciences and drug development in Québec. This philosophy is one that stresses the importance of public-private partnerships in facilitating early stage drug discovery. Backed by the Québec Government, Pfizer Canada, and of course AstraZeneca, the NEOMED Institute operates in two parts, firstly as an organization (NEOMED), and secondly on a larger scale, a building or institute that houses, today, 10 life science companies. So how did two competing pharma companies come together with the Government of Québec on a common goal? For starters, the creation of the NEOMED Institute happened in large part thanks to two individuals: current President and CEO of NEOMED and the NEOMED Institute Dr. Max Fehlmann, and NEOMED’s CSO, Dr. Philippe Walker. Fehlmann explains that the wheels were already in motion for an organization like NEOMED long before the AstraZeneca closing. “We in the life science community were prepared to imagine something that could be the missing link in all the chain of players
20
Biotechnology Focus / October 2013
in the Biopharma ecosystem and when the opportunity of using AstraZeneca Research Centre arose, we were given the tool to address this missing link.” Like Fehlmann, Walker also saw opportunity with the closing. Until June 2012, Walker was vice-president and head of the AstraZeneca R&D Montréal (AZRDM) research centre that delivered multiple drug candidates to the AstraZeneca portfolio. “I had actually been recruited from Switzerland to Canada in 1994 to build the Montréal facility so I had a long history with the research facility. Moreover, I was also part of the global leadership team for AstraZeneca, so I was aware of the challenges that they and other pharma companies were facing, and understood their need to reduce their internal R&D activity. When I was told we were closing the site, it was not surprising, on the one hand I was very sad for the impact this was going to have on about 150 families, but knowing how valuable the facility itself was, I also saw an opportunity to use the facility in another way.” Together, the two decided to work together to create something that could fill the void left by the big pharma’s exodus, but also something that could act as a catalyst for the local life science sector. “Using the logic that pharma companies were saying we’re going to reduce the risk by acquiring outside R&D programs, there would need to be someone or something to fill a niche of advancing these R&D programs in smaller biotech companies to the stage they’d be acquired,” says Walker. Filling such a niche was only part of the equation. As a member of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Walker also had the opportunity to see the great science and innovation underway in academic institutions in Canada, but also the huge challenges in transforming this great work into solid proposals for industry. He thought that perhaps
