🤝 Meet Peter van der Velden. He’s the Executive Chairman of Lumira Ventures, Canada’s largest dedicated life sciences venture capital firm. Lumira recently launched the Cancer Breakthrough Fund in partnership with the Terry Fox Foundation to invest in innovative cancer companies. We asked Peter about where he sees opportunities in the space, the cutting edge of cancer treatment today, and the most promising advances in cancer treatment coming in the future.
What is the focus of the Cancer Breakthrough Fund (CBF) versus the typical Lumira Ventures investment?
Our core funds take a broad focus on biotech and medtech across the North American landscape while the CBF is solely focused on Cancer and is skewed to Canadian companies.
What’s the thinking in partnering with the Terry Fox Foundation and the Canadian Cancer Society? Does that give you an edge in finding opportunities?
I don’t think the edge is with respect to “finding” deals per se, it is about having engaged partners who have a shared vision. These two institutions support the leading clinicians and academic researchers across the country and we have worked with them to develop a committee of Key Opinion Leaders who can help us vet the scientific innovation and clinical strategies core to the companies we are evaluating for investment participation.
The release mentions one approved investment. Without naming it if you can't, what made it the right first deployment? What did it tell you about the kind of bets this fund should be making?
The first investment is in an Ontario-based company that is collaborating with and using cancer patient data sets that are unique to the Canadian ecosystem. The company is currently completing a $15M financing syndicated with US and Canadian investors which we expect to close in Q2. The company is led by a highly entrepreneurial CEO who moved to Canada to start the business and it has already successfully built-out relationships with leading pharma partners.
Is deal flow solid for the sort of companies you’re looking for in Canada? Do you have to really search to find good bets to place or are there lots of promising opportunities in the space?
The deal flow pool in Canada is actually very deep and our team is diligently engaged with many of those companies to evaluate which offer the best mix of: patient need and impact, market opportunity, technology differentiation, clinical development plan, risk, mission driven leadership, and the ability to raise capital today and in the future to support the development plan.
Are there any sort of patterns or commonalities you see in founders who do well in biotech? I’m curious how often it’s someone with a science or medical background versus someone from the business side who finds partners with that sort of expertise — or somewhere else along that spectrum.
For us it is really about finding and partnering with mission driven entrepreneurs who are linearly focused on turning transformative science into impactful products for patients. Frankly, these people can come from either of those backgrounds. As an example, our Canadian portfolio company Zymeworks was founded and built by a scientific founder, while our Canadian company Exact Imaging was founded by a serial entrepreneur and businessman.
One of the core things we are looking for in leadership is strong business development skills as evidenced by the ability to raise capital, attract the best people to the team, and develop highly accretive partnerships with strategic partners and scientific collaborators.
You mention in a recent press release that “much of the value capture resulting from the building of life science companies based on Canadian innovation has largely accrued to foreign investors.” Why does this happen? What needs to change for more of that value to stay in Canada?
One of the great things about the life sciences ecosystem in Canada is that over the past decade it has generated more high value companies, and in particular, more high value exits for VC investors than any other part of the domestic ecosystem (RBCx shared recently 22% of deal volume and 44% of deal value was attributed to life sciences). Unfortunately, Canada has a profound lack of breadth, and in particular depth, of investment capital for life sciences companies. As the best companies in Canada grow and scale, they are forced to source the majority of their growth capital from foreign investors. As a result, as these companies monetize their value, the bulk of that value accrues to these foreign investors.
Is the messiness in the US biotech space with NIH cuts creating more opportunity for Canadian companies? Are you seeing any change there?
Maybe, but unclear at this point in time. What is clear is some very bright Canadian investors and innovators are returning to Canada, and in parallel some excellent scientists are looking for opportunities here. However, we still have system challenges to overcome, one of which being financing and access to capital to support innovative life science companies
What are some promising innovations or advances in the cancer care space that have already happened that you’re excited about?
One of the most exciting innovations that we have backed is histotripsy as deployed by our portfolio company HistoSonics. HistoSonics is a medical device company, and while we don’t typically think of medical device companies as leaders in Cancer innovation, it has developed and is now commercializing a non-invasive robotic ultrasound system (histotripsy) to non-invasively destroy targeted tissue. The technology has already been FDA-cleared in liver tumours and a week ago the company filed for approval in kidney as well. This is one of the fastest growing robotic surgical platforms in history and the impact on patients is nothing short of transformative
Where do you think the biggest advances in cancer treatment will come in the next 5-10 years?
In our view the biggest advances in cancer treatment are likely to come from: immunotherapy (especially next-gen cell therapies and T-cell engagers), personalized/precision medicine (focused ultrasound, genomics, protein degradation), smarter radiotherapy and radiopharmaceuticals, and technologies that improve drug delivery into tumours.
You talk about impact in addition to generating healthy returns. In a best-case scenario, what sort of impact do you hope for this fund to have?
In the best case-scenario we back one or more companies that in the next ten years develop a technology to and through the clinic to an FDA approval and as a result these products deliver transformative outcomes for patients by either addressing a completely unmet need (first-in-class) and/or by offering a safer (more targeted and less toxic) and more efficacious treatment than those that are currently available.
