Two small flags – one British, one Canadian – sit in a holder on Paul Drohan's desk in his new office at LifeSciences BC. On one wall hangs a framed, ornate Aborigine boomerang.
Fitting symbols for the 52-year-old Canadian-born businessman, who spent eight years in the U.K. as senior vice-president for Genzyme's commonwealth and South African group of companies before returning to Canada in January.
As the new president and CEO of LifeSciences BC, he plans to use his international connections and deep knowledge of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to help expand B.C.'s life sciences sector beyond what it is now: an incubator for biotechs that end up being acquired or move.
"I asked this of the board when they hired me: 'Are we trying to build a life science world-class industry sector, or are we just trying to get companies to a level where they can be big enough and sold off?' Because B.C. has been very good at doing that – it's very entrepreneurial."
B.C.'s once-thriving biotech sector is still recovering from a prolonged contraction – battered by a drought of investment capital and a series of bankruptcies and downsizing.
"We saw a contraction of the industry around the world," Drohan said. "Biotech was decimated in the U.S. as well – this is not just a Canadian or Vancouver phenomenon."
But there have been encouraging signs of recovery, including a number of American biotechs going public recently.
LifeSciences BC is the umbrella organization for 185 life sciences companies and organizations – two-thirds of which are small companies with two to 20 employees.
Drohan believes some of those small companies have the potential to become the next Stemcell Technologies Inc., which employs 500.
"We need to be doing things to help the startups," Drohan said. "We need to look for ways to bring venture [capital] here. We need to help them with business acumen, because a lot of them are scientists, [and] some of them don't have the acumen to run a company."
Drohan said Vancouver's life sciences sector has several real advantages over some other biotech hubs. One is the amount of high quality research done at B.C. universities, research hospitals and agencies like the BC Cancer Agency, the Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. Another asset is Vancouver's vibrant information technology sector.
"I think what is really going to put Vancouver on the map, if we do it right, is the convergence of the IT sector with life sciences," Drohan said. "If you look at Telus Health, that's a great example. One of the larger employers in the province, headquartered in Vancouver, they've made big bets in what digital health is going to look like.
"We need to get behind organizations like Wavefront and Telus Health, because if we really want to be a sector that is world class, we have an opportunity to bring that IT sector and the life science sector together, and there's not a lot of places around the world that have that opportunity like we have today."
He also believes genomics-based research will provide tremendous opportunities and said B.C.'s Chinese and Indian populations provide some important genetic data sets that could be used for genomics-based research and medicine. With China's and India's populations exceeding two billion, that is a huge market for any genomics-based medicines or therapies developed here.
"We need to get behind organizations like Genome BC because that is the future of medicine," Drohan said.
There are roadblocks to research in B.C., however. The B.C. government sits on a treasure trove of medical history that could provide important data for researchers and biotechs working on new drug therapies but does not readily share it.
"We really need the curators of data to loosen the strings," Drohan said. "We have 20 years of data here in B.C. that no one can get access to. We should start allowing people to interrogate that data to help them generate faster research outputs as a result of having those patient populations characterized. It could be a revenue stream for the province. The U.K. has done it."
Drohan hopes to use his international connections to help B.C. biotechs and researchers gain access to global markets. He sees potential opportunities, for example, for the HIV vaccine Vancouver's Network Immunology is developing in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 20% of the population aged 15 to 45 is HIV-positive.
Drohan added the recently concluded Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement has provisions that will benefit Canadian pharmaceutical companies, and reductions of tariffs will benefit companies like Stemcell and Starfish Medical, both of which do business in Europe.
But he added Canada needs a reciprocity agreement with Europe on new drug approvals, because the process takes too long in Canada. Of 30 drugs recently approved by both Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Drohan said the EMA approval process was 267 days faster than Health Canada's.
"If we had reciprocity of approvals, we wouldn't have to worry about Health Canada."
Born and raised in Toronto, Drohan obtained a degree in biochemistry from the University of Toronto and diplomas in finance and marketing from York University. His first job was doing research at McMaster University in adult respiratory distress syndrome.
He went into the pharmaceutical industry, spending 10 years with the Upjohn Company, which was eventually acquired by Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE). He left before that acquisition to join Genzyme – which specialized in developing orphan drugs – as general manager for Canadian operations.
"We started with two employees and just a little over $2 million in revenue," Drohan said. "My boss left two years after I was hired in 1996, and left me holding the keys to the kingdom. We took the company up to 55 employees and $55 million in seven years."
Based on that success – and a Canadian's knowledge of parliamentary government and universal health care – Genzyme then offered him a job that took him and his family to Oxford, England. There he became general manager for Genzyme U.K. and Ireland.
In 2011, Genzyme was acquired by Sanofi (NYSE:SNY) for $20 billion. When Drohan's wife, Joyce Drohan, completed a major project for the U.K. government's department of national health, the couple had reached a career crossroads.
"We both hit the right inflection point," Drohan said. "It was either stay in the U.K. for another 10 years or come back to Canada."
With family in B.C., the couple decided to move to Vancouver. As he is an avid cyclist and a former Level 1 ski instructor, Vancouver appeals to his personal interests as well.
Neither of the Drohans had jobs when they arrived here in January with their four daughters.
When former LifeSciencesBC president Don Enns left for a job in the private sector, Paul Drohan became an ideal replacement.
"His track record as a collaborative business leader in Canada, the U.K. , and literally around the world is exactly the kind of person our community was looking for," said Life Sciences BC chairman Gordon McCauley.
"He has shown, through hard work, that he knows how to lead groups developing some of the most innovative medicines in the world, and create knowledge-based industries along the way, in a rapidly evolving environment. That's exactly where we are as a life sciences community."
