AbCellera is a Vancouver-based biotechnology company that uses its proprietary platform to discover and develop antibody-based medicines. It is advancing a pipeline of drug programs in areas including endocrinology, women’s health, immunology, oncology, and more.
After two decades in academia, you built a company focused on real-world medicines. How did that change your definition of impact, and how daunting was the leap?
In academia, I was working on technologies that brought together different areas of science and focused them on a single biomedical problem. In 2012, I realized that if we wanted to take it to the next level and really make an impact, it would be best done in a company, not at the university. It’s a good example of academic work setting the stage: we explored different areas, with many dead ends, but after more than 10 years, we identified the place we could really make a difference—better tools for antibody discovery.
Building a global company that creates jobs, attracts resources, and repeatedly delivers impactful medicines is an incredibly inspiring and meaningful goal. We had a clear vision to advance the technology, become a leader in antibody discovery, and build a global biopharma—but we didn’t fully understand the time and effort it would take. If we had, we might have been scared away. But you don’t build a company all at once. Today, we’re around 600 people, have a market cap of over a billion dollars, and our first drug programs are in the clinic. Behind that, we have a robust technology platform, and maintain a strong liquidity position—we’re in a great spot. The ambition to be a fully integrated global biopharma is still a big vision, but great companies are built by taking things step by step and compounding improvements over decades.
Your COVID-19 work became a defining example of Canadian innovation reaching global impact. How did that moment shape the company’s trajectory, both immediately and in the years since?
That moment built on everything we had been doing for years. We started in 2012, and we bootstrapped with a small friends-and-family round and avoided venture capital early on. This was critical because once you take venture money, you’re on the clock, and for a platform company, that can force exits before you’ve built something substantial. Instead, we built a partnership model doing discovery for large and small companies, which brought in early revenue - unusual for biotech. As a result, we didn’t take institutional money until 2018, when we were about 50 people. By early 2020, we had raised a larger round with investors like Baker Brothers, Thiel Capital, Viking, and OrbiMed at roughly a $300 million valuation, with 100+ people, a proven platform, revenue, and financing meant to carry us five years. At the same time, we had been working with DARPA for about a year and a half prior on pandemic-response technologies—a roughly $30 million program—so we were ready when the pandemic hit.
Through NIH connections, we accessed one of the first patient samples and used our platform to discover and develop what became the first antibody therapy to receive emergency use authorization in the U.S. and Canada with our partner, Eli Lilly. As a company that had only raised $10 million coming into 2020, by the end of the year we successfully completed an IPO, reaching a market cap well north of $12 billion. After going public, we didn’t change strategy—we stayed focused on building the best platform for antibody discovery and accelerated the partnership business. We discovered two COVID-19 antibody therapies that treated more tan two million people. The royalty revenue from the COVID work brought in about a billion dollars between 2021 and 2023, alongside substantial non-dilutive funding from the Canadian government. Today, AbCellera is more than 10 times the company it was in 2020 with capabilities, infrastructure, manufacturing, people, and technology that typically take decades and over a billion dollars to build. We still have the same liquidity position we had during the IPO, so we’re in control of our fate even after five years in a biotech bear market.
You’ve shifted from a platform and partnership model toward developing your own internal pipeline. How are you defining success in 2026 in terms of both scientific progress and patient impact?
In 2023, we decided that, with the our technology platform and strong capital position, we would start using our platform to develop our own programs and keep control of IP for antibody therapies locally. Before that, we worked on around 100 programs with a range of biotech companies, including some of the best in the industry. One of the most valuable things was the market feedback—it showed us where the toughest problems were and where to direct capability-building. Over the first 10 years, we became very good at solving the hardest, most important problems by working with top companies and pushing into areas where they were challenged.
This shift started in 2023, and developing a pipeline of potential new medicines takes time—typically five years from concept to clinical trials. We had a head start, so over the last two and a half years we’ve been transitioning into a drug developer and bringing our first programs forward. Last year, we were preclinical; this year, we have two programs in clinical development. The lead program, ABCL635, is a potential first-in-class antibody drug candidate for the non-hormonal treatment of menopause-related hot flashes. It moved to Phase 2 in less than a year, with a readout in Q3 that could be extremely de-risking. If it performs as expected, we’ll know if we have a drug and a clear path into late-stage trials. That path would be relatively low-risk toward an approved product with revenue, with the potential to help a large number of women who cannot or choose not to take hormone therapy, so there is a potential blockbuster opportunity. By the end of next year, we may have four or five programs in our pipeline.
Women’s health has long been overlooked and underfunded, particularly in areas like menopause. Why is the timing different now?
Twenty years ago, menopausal hormone therapy was broadly used, with many seeking treatment for life-altering symptoms. Moderate-to-severe hot flashes are incredibly disruptive - they impact sleep, focus, and women can have 10 or 20 serious episodes a day. Then the Women’s Health Initiative study concluded risks, particularly cardiovascular disease and cancer, were elevated by menopausal hormone therapy. Use shifted from broad adoption to almost none, with a black box warning added. For about 20 years, women were essentially told that there was not much that could be done and that became normalized.
In the last year, a few things have changed. There are now two non-hormonal options available for treating hot flashes. More importantly, the FDA removed the black box warning on menopausal hormone therapy, concluding that while risks exist for some populations, for most women the risk-benefit favors hormone therapy. That has brought much more attention to the space, and women are more willing to say this isn’t aceptable, and that they need solutions. Even as recently as two years ago, investors were skeptical of women’s health; that narrative has shifted quickly.
Canada is often seen as exceptional at producing innovation and talent, but less successful at capturing value at scale. What is actually going wrong in Canada, especially in biotech?
It’s not uniquely hard to grow a global biotech company in Canada—it’s almost impossibly hard anywhere. When you look at the history of the industry—timelines, investment, what it takes to become a global champion—you see how rare it is. Companies that have a winning product, a platform to keep producing them, and a pipeline behind it end up with market caps around $20 billion—that’s the escape velocity. A couple of years ago, there were maybe eight or nine companies globally, founded in the last 40 years, that had reached that point. Thousands get founded, but very few become sustainable innovation engines and transition into comercial-stage, profitable companies. Where AbCellera is today, we’re not disadvantaged relative to peers—the hard part is getting there at all.
We often hear that the issue is lack of access to talent, infrastructure, and capital. Those are all true at some level - we’ve had to build three buildings ourselves. But great companies can access capital across borders. The bigger issue is that we start too many small ideas. We think too small from the beginning. To use a baseball analogy, if you step up to the plate and then bunt, you can’t complain that we haven’t hit enough home runs. Small-thinking becomes self-perpetuating: limited success leads to lower investor belief, which leads to smaller pitches, which then fail to attract the right talent or capital. Those safer, incremental ideas become the hardest to scale because they never had the potential to begin with.
Canada is often described as constrained not just by capital or infrastructure, but by a more cautious business culture. What specifically needs to change, and why do you remain optimistic?
When we first put together a business plan, people insisted we needed an exit plan right away. The idea was that maybe in five years AbCellera could be a $100 million company sold for the technology. When I pitched that locally, the response was incredulity—that it was too big. But if you pitched that in San Francisco, you’d get laughed out of the room. The Series A should be $100 million, not the exit. You should be talking about a $10 billion company.
Canada wants economic growth and high-tech industries to create jobs and restore productivity. If you look at the top 100 companies in Canada by market cap, five are technology companies, with a combined market cap of $400 billion. The list is dominated by finance, telecom, and resources. In the U.S., the top 100 include 30 or 40 tech companies, with a combined market cap more than 100 times that of Canada—at least 10 times bigger per capita. That lack of scalable global champions explains the productivity gap in GDP per capita between Canada and the U.S.
Where is the country best positioned to build companies that can truly compete and win at a global scale?
There’s no better space than biotechnology. The field has moved dramatically fast over the last 20 years, with immense opportunity across many diseases—clear unmet need and a strong scientific basis. We do have great science and a highly educated workforce. And biotech is not winner-take-all: in AI, who is going to take on Google or NVIDIA? It’s not obvious you’re ever going to win that. But in biotech, you find one important drug, bring it forward, and you have a multi-billion-dollar product you can use to grow.
If we don’t get to scale, Canada will be forever condemned to be a research outlet for the United States.
Leadership recognizes Canada needs to stand on its own two feet, and global champion companies are key. There’s also been a structural shift: Canada and other NATO countries committing to increased defense spending will drive industrial policy and sustained investment. If we choose wisely, 20 years from now, we could have global companies—curing cancer, building new energy sources,—high-tech, deep-tech businesses that move the country forward. The tone across business, politics, and universities is already much better than it was two years ago, and that’s the first step.
