EXECUTIVE PROFILE
McPherson’s Perspective

Biomira’s CEO takes a long look at biotech

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By Patricia Nicholson

Dr. Alex McPherson, PhD has been president and CEO of Biomira Inc. (Edmonton, AB) since 1991, making him the longest continuously serving biotech president in Canada.

But the road to biotech was a long one for McPherson. Before becoming a biotech executive, McPherson made his mark in academia, clinical medicine and the public sector. A quick survey of his extensive CV reveals that he has been affiliated with the University of Alberta (U of A) (Edmonton, AB) for 25 years, and is now professor emeritus.

He is also a former director of Medicine for the Cross Cancer Institute (Edmonton, AB), and served as president of the Alberta Medical Association (Edmonton, AB), and later as president of the Canadian Medical Association (Ottawa, ON). In 1985, McPherson became deputy minister of Alberta Hospitals and Medical Care, and in 1988-89, he also served as deputy commissioner and executive director of the Premier’s Commission on Future Health Care for Albertans.

New Direction
“I hadn’t even considered the possibility of going into industry when I was moving from the deputy minister’s job back into university, because I was expecting to go back to the university and be head of a department, or an associate dean or something of that nature,” McPherson says. “And I wasn’t really genuinely relishing that possibility, frankly, because I had already done those jobs — I’d been there, done that.”

By that time, he had also joined the board of directors of a company called Biomira, a biotech startup that was developing cancer vaccines. McPherson says that he had really enjoyed his experience as a member of Biomira’s board, so when the opportunity arose to become president and CEO, it seemed like the right move.

“I really looked forward to what I thought was going to be, and has been, a very challenging and exciting opportunity for me,” he says.

The transition from academic and public sector management to running a public company was a big change.

“Decision-making is enormously quicker, particularly with a young and relatively immature small biotech company,” he says.

“Another big difference is the fact that people are extremely well motivated in industry, because they clearly see — particularly in our kind of business, where we’re dealing with cancer — the possible importance of achieving good results with our products.”

Voice of Experience
Despite the changes, McPherson says his broad experience prior to joining Biomira has served him in many ways.

“I have a PhD in immunology, which I got in Australia after I’d finished my MD in Edmonton at the University of Alberta in 1962. So I finished my work in Australia from ’64 to ’69, during which I got my postgraduate qualification in internal medicine, and I got my PhD in immunology at then the foremost immunology centre in the world, which was the Hall Institute in Melbourne,” McPherson says. “The experience that I gained in those areas, both in the clinical and at the academic research level, has been very helpful to me as CEO of a company that’s based upon immunology and chemistry and depends upon — very heavily — clinical trials.

“My experience back here as the director of Medicine for the Cross Cancer Institute from ’72 to ’85 certainly helped me greatly in terms of interaction with patients and doctors, and understanding of the clinical trial process.

“My background as deputy minister helped me greatly with respect to how to manage people — and a very large part of running an organization like this is, quite honestly, how you interact and communicate with your employee group, your board, your external audiences such as your investors and your internal audiences such as your employee group, as well as external audiences such as investigators and patients.

“But I guess the most important component to the job is networking, and the ability to delegate responsibilities,” McPherson says. “At the end of the day, this kind of a job can’t be done effectively by one person. It has to be done by a team of individuals, and it’s how you develop that team and how you get the confidence of that team that’s critically important.”

The Biomira team started small in 1985, with some venture capital to develop technology spun out of U of A. McPherson says Biomira’s founders — immunologist Michael Longenecker, PhD and bionucleonics and radiopharmacy professor Antoine Noujaim, PhD — built on the foundations laid by Alberta’s late, great carbohydrate chemist Raymond Lemieux, PhD.

McPherson joined Biomira’s board of directors in 1987, when the company did its first public offering. A follow-on offering in 1991 coincided with McPherson’s appointment as president and CEO. The company had about 200 employees by then, he says, and eventually grew to 300 or so.

“I hate to say it, because I’m paraphrasing a former dean of mine,” McPherson says. “I’m asked how I get all this work done when I’m away, and I say that it’s the same people that do it when I’m here. Because the reality is, the vast majority of the day-to-day work is delegated to very competent vice-presidents who are very hard to attract and, to a considerable extent, hard to retain, because this is a very vibrant industry with an awful lot of opportunities.”

Development Only
Biomira has adopted a business model that McPherson calls NRDO, for “no research, development only.”

“We have downsized our internal research capability so that it’s entirely a clinical support group that provides applied research programs directed toward us getting products commercialized,” he explains. “We are still doing manufacturing, but we’re doing the manufacturing largely on an outsourced basis with oversight opportunities.”

The company is focused on its two most advanced product candidates, and is not developing a further pipeline in-house.

“We are really concentrating our efforts and our finances on moving toward commercialization, with the idea that in-licensing opportunities from universities, research institutes and other companies that have already shown some substantial evidence of proof of principle will be the best way and the best use of our investors’ money, rather than spending the huge amounts of money on internal research that’s probably already being done externally,” McPherson says.

In 2001, Biomira signed a co-development deal with Merck KGaA, a major pharmaceutical company based in Darmstadt, Germany.

“Part of that deal is not only co-development of the products in at least two indications for the two products — one of which is a carbohydrate vaccine and the other of which is a peptide vaccine — but we have co-promotion rights in North America,” McPherson explains. “Which means that we have the opportunity to develop a marketing, sales and distribution team at a 50-50 level with Merck in North America. And really, that’s where the vast majority of value-added return occurs, naturally — when one has the opportunity to commercialize and start to market and distribute a product.”

Biomira will also receive royalties upon successful commercialization outside of North America. But such deals are about more than financial arrangements.

“It gives you validation of your product. It gives you tremendous expertise in areas that you might lack that expertise — particularly, in our case, in Europe, where Merck KGaA has a very strong presence,” McPherson says. “In addition to that, it gives you external wisdom with respect to moving your programs forward. In addition, of course, to the cash that is of considerable importance.”

The Merck partnership is helping Biomira develop Theratope® and L-BLP25. Theratope, a cancer vaccine designed to stimulate an immune response to the tumour-associated antigen sialyl Tn, recently completed a Phase III trial in breast cancer.

“Within that particular trial, we identified a subset of the population of patients who were receiving hormonal therapy for metastatic breast cancer, who also received prior chemotherapy with evidence of response, and then were treated with our Theratope vaccine versus being treated with nonspecific immunotherapy. And in that group we saw about a seven-and-a-half-month improvement in median survival, which was not statistically significant but approached statistical significance,” McPherson says. “We are now looking at possible mechanisms of action, and we are looking at the possibility, with our partner, of approaching regulatory authorities concerning possible additional Phase III clinical trials.”

Biomira’s second vaccine, L-BLP25, is a peptide product with a liposomal delivery system.

“The liposome is used to try to attract the antigen — the peptide — to the lymph nodes, and therein attract it to the appropriate immune cells to attack the naturally occurring molecule that’s resident on a variety of tumour cells. But in our case we’re looking at non-small cell lung cancer,” McPherson says.

Preliminary results of a Phase IIb clinical trial for L-BLP25 were released in early April. Biomira announced that overall survival results for patients with late-stage non-small cell lung cancer were encouraging.

Theratope stimulates predominantly the antibody side of the immune response, while L-BLP25 stimulates primarily the cell-mediated side of the immune response, McPherson explains.

“So it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that it’s possible that as we go forward, particularly after commercialization, that these products will be used sequentially or in combination, because they attack different parts of the immune response,” he adds.

They may also have wider indications in oncology. “The antigens, or the molecules that the synthetic products that we’re working with are mimics for, are present on a wide variety of solid tumour malignancies,” McPherson says.

Right at Home
Born in Calgary, McPherson is a proud fourth-generation Albertan.

“My great-great-grandfather came out here in 1883, via an area around Hamilton, where he landed in the 1850s from Scotland,” he says. McPherson’s career took him to the other side of the world, but he wound up returning to his roots in Alberta — although he adds that because his wife is from Australia, they still visit the country where they met.

“At the end of the day, the reason that we came back to Alberta was the opportunity at the research academic level was by far the best in Canada,” McPherson says. “We’re talking about the 1969 period. There was enormous growth in Alberta. Alberta was heavily committed to developing, particularly in the medical sciences, a very, very strong research base, and I was a research clinician. I was offered very, very great opportunities from the point of view of labs and initial research support and so forth. Plus, I happened to love the city, love the province, and love the country.

“I was able to convince my wife, who had never been here, that it was summer eight or nine months of the year, and we only saw the occasional little bit of frost. For which she’s never forgiven me,” he adds with a chuckle.

Edmonton, he says, has “a pretty viable cluster of biotech,” consisting largely of U of A spinoffs.

“One of the critical facts of life is, if the kind of quality expertise in science is not developed in an adjacent university or research institution setting, then it’s unlikely that much in the way of biotech will gravitate to the private sector in that location,” McPherson says.

“So if that tie between the universities and the research institutions in a particular location and the private sector is ever seriously disturbed through policy from government or policy at the university level, then that fragile flower called biotechnology will certainly disappear from that location, if not Canada,” he says.

Investments by various levels of government in basic and applied research have been enormously successful in developing world-class re-search programs in Alberta and in Canada, McPherson says.

“What is really sadly lacking, and could be the ultimate cause of the demise of the biotechnology industry in Cana-da, is funding for movement of products from the research and development phase, with the emphasis on development, through to commercialization,” he adds.

Investors are often looking for quicker returns than biotech can offer, McPherson explains, citing a $100-million price tag and 12- to 14-year timeline for drug development.

“But it is an industry with enormous opportunity for growth, and the trickle-down effects as a knowledge-based industry are absolutely enormous, particularly to a country like Canada, which has spent literally billions, if not trillions, of dollars across the country in federal and provincial funds to develop research in the area of science and technology,” he says. “To have that enormous amount of investment all go to waste, or, more likely, migrate to other locations or be acquired by other companies, is a true travesty. But it’s certainly a possibility.”

Complex Challenges
With two product candidates in late-stage clinical trials, McPherson has already guided Biomira through many of the industry’s flaming hoops.

“The biggest challenges, frankly, have been maintaining a level of investor interest so that we’re able to approach the public markets in order to continue to finance these programs. It’s important to know that these programs are entirely financed by the public markets,” McPherson says.

“The second-largest challenge, of course, is the fact that you have to grow from a small company to a company that has the capacity to run clinical trials — on an oversight basis, at least — that involve 120 centres in something like 11 countries, and enrol over a thousand patients,” he says. “This is a massive undertaking with great complexity. But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is if you don’t have the cash to play, you don’t play.”

Now, he says, the company is tightly focused on outcomes that move a product toward commercialization.

“We don’t have much of what we call skunkworks, if any, in the organization. And we have no basic research left in our organization at all,” McPherson says. “Skunkworks are those little bits of work that are done down in the hollows by research scientists with their technicians, using budgets that were allocated for other reasons — which everyone knows occurs, but nobody wants to talk about.”

After more than a decade at the helm of Biomira, some of the biggest challenges are now behind him. But the grand prize is still on the horizon for McPherson, and for Biomira.

“The biggest hurdle we still have ahead of us is to move one or both of the products that we have in advanced clinical development to commercialization. That’s unquestionably the biggest hurdle we have,” he says. “That’s the one we’re focusing on, and we believe that that’s possible. But anybody that tries to predict biology in the clinical research setting is a wiser man than I am.”