"How I Did It"Older article, but I don't remember seeing it before. How Vancouver company built B.C. biotech’s new French connection: Emergency room experience parlayed into a biotech company success 
Howard Verrico Tue Jul 17, 2012 12:01am PST Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. This week, Howard Verrico explains how he formed his own biotech company, Sirona Biochem (TSX-V:SBM), and found a partner in France by drawing on his experience as an investor and an emergency room physician.
“In addition to working in the emergency department at Ridge Meadows Hospital in Maple Ridge, I had been involved in venture capital. I had invested in a multitude of startup resource companies.
“With my experience in sciences and medicine, I thought a biotech project would be very interesting. So I took on this challenge of founding this company with a number of other individuals – High Rider Capital.
“[It] was a fund that had no project, but it was publicly trading at that stage. The aim was to find a biotech project. Biotech was having challenges in raising capital, so we had a selection of excellent projects to choose from.
“Eventually we formed a licensing deal with a scientist based out of France, who was the founder of a private company called TFChem. She was developing ways to stabilize carbohydrate molecules.
“The project developed a medication to treat diabetes. We chose her project because we saw enormous potential in the technology. Carbohydrate chemistry specializes in molecules that have a carbohydrate component. These molecules can develop new forms of drugs. … [but] they tend to be unstable, and your body rapidly metabolizes them, making them ineffective. If you can stabilize these molecules, you open up a whole new group of potential candidates for new drugs.
“In 2007, we acquired TFChem, and we proceeded on this project for the development of a new diabetic drug. We’ve always looked at how do we mitigate the risks but still maintain the enormous reward potential of the development of our technology, and part of that is diversification. Carbohydrate molecules have a vast range of potential applications. In our current pipeline, we’re looking at the diabetic drug, cosmetic agents, anti-aging dermatological applications.
“By having multiple projects, if one project doesn’t seem to be performing as anticipated, we can downscale that project and focus on projects that seem to be having greater success. Many of the cosmetic products require little to no regulatory approval, so it’s a much quicker process to commercialization, much less costly. We anticipate that our entire skin whitener project will cost $3.5 million to commercialize, and we have a $1.9 million grant from the French government.
“This will take us to a product – our goal is three years – to commercialize, and we’re entering a $10 billion market. We don’t require a large pharmaceutical company to help us take it to that phase. This is something we can do as a company. We can license a fully developed product, which means it has enormous value for Sirona BioChem. •