You recently said that the drug discovery industry was experiencing a ‘watershed moment’ due to a variety of factors such as the advent of technological tools; what is Congruence’s approach to drug discovery in this context?
When I founded Congruence I just wanted to develop a drug for a rare disease as I had done in my previous enterprise. The diseases that we began by going after are of a particular type; namely, diseases of protein misfolding. As I began to investigate the tools that are available to study protein shape in order to address these diseases, I realized that the field had boomed. The reasons for this are manifold; firstly, we now have genetic sequencing data that we did not have 10 years ago, so it is possible to differentiate if a single protein has a whole series of mutations that cause the ‘misfolding’, or a series of mutations that do not affect its functioning, at all. We use the evolutionary experiment of mutations - benign and pathogenic - as our ground truth for our computational advancements. The other radical advancement is that of computing power - the things one can do with a laptop computer today are simply awesome, and the machine learning tools, as well as the tools to study interatomic interactions are particularly useful for the study of protein misfolding. Hence, when I was exposed to all of these tools and the expertise around them, I thought they could be the key to making the drug discovery cycle both more efficient and more powerful, and that is how Revenir was born.
Revenir is our computational engine, and it works in four steps. The first three steps happen all in silico, so as you might imagine those are rather quick. The fourth step happens in the wet lab, where we actually synthesize the predicted small molecules and we test them. In a nutshell. Revenir’s purpose is to generate novel chemical matter targeted at new, hard to discover protein binding pockets, that could pharmacologically stabilize a mutated protein driving a disease
You recently raised US$50 million to target rare diseases; who is the investor and what does the journey look like from today to the day Congruence operates independently?
We were very pleased to find a very supportive syndicate of investors that included Investissement Quebec, the FTQ, Lumira, Amplitude (a new fund here in Montreal) OrbiMed and Driehaus - these were the seven main investors in the series A round.
A biotech company will raise several rounds until it goes public and has a drug on the market, which takes years - this chronological stereotype is also true for us. Later this year we will start talking about a series B round. Thereafter, this series B round would potentially be able to fund one of our drug candidates all the way to the clinic. Also, after that series B investment we would potentially go public - depending on the market conditions - and once we go public we would draw upon those sources of funds to fully take us through the clinic all the way to commercialization; it is a long journey indeed.
As your southern neighbors struggle with policy in the context of the Inflation Reduction Act, what is the situation regarding policy and the life sciences here in Canada?
We feel very supported by policy here - for Investissement Quebec this was their first private investment for example, and a lot of these venture capital arms like FTQ have mandates not only to make a return on investment, but also to achieve economic development. My approach has always been to try and align myself, both at Congruence and at my previous company, with investors.
What would success look like for Congruence?
My goal is to help patients - we are very far away from that right now, but we keep it in the front of our minds.
A company should not exist if it does not have a good purpose, and we have that purpose, and it constantly shows us where our ‘north star’ is.
This ‘north star’ is what orientates me, what makes me see whether I am actually spending my investors’ money wisely by making the right decision so as to create value. The other goal is to create an environment and a team where people can be at their best, discovering new things. Today, bearing in mind that we are positioned at the interface of new technologies, this is more important than ever.
