As a scientist and entrepreneur, Allen Eaves has demonstrated there's not much he can't do.
As a scientist, he found a way to kill off the cancerous bone marrow cells in leukemia patients, make healthy ones thrive and transplant them back into a patient after chemotherapy – something that eliminated the need for bone marrow donors.
As an entrepreneur, he founded the Terry Fox Laboratory and then spun out Stemcell Technologies Inc. – the biggest, most successful biotechnology company in B.C.
He is credited with the success of Mitacs – which connects industry with science grads to foster investment in research and development – and the creation of a new spinoff, Mprime, which he now chairs. He has published 200 scientific articles, and the awards and accolades he has garnered over the years are too numerous to list. There's just one thing the 72-year-old self-professed workaholic has not been able to do yet: build a private research hospital in Vancouver.
"There really is no opportunity to grow this business in Canada," he laments.
Not that he plans to give up trying to build one. He believes Vancouver is well positioned to tap the Pacific Rim's wealth to serve the medical tourism market, profits from which would be used to fund research. It was that model that developed Stemcell Technologies into what it is today: a company with 500 employees, on pace to do $72 million in sales this year and growing 15% to 20% annually.
He has enjoyed similar success in his non-commercial ventures, like Mitacs, which he chaired from 2001 to 2011, increasing industry R&D investment by 25% per year.
"Allen has been there all the way through the success of Mitacs, and the only thing which is probably more successful than Mitacs was Allen's own success story and his business," said mathematician Nassif Ghoussoub, who served as director for Mitacs while Eaves served as chairman of the board, and now serves as scientific director for Mprime, which Eaves also chairs.
"He's been one of the very, very few big success stories in B.C. biotech in a whole raft of failures," added long-time associate Pieter Cullis, director of NanoMedicines Research Group and professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of British Columbia.
"He's grown that company in a really organic way, never taking too much of a chance, but on the other hand supplying what the market needed."
Born in Ottawa and raised in Nova Scotia, Eaves earned a bachelor of science degree from Acadia University and a master's in science from Dalhousie and was considering a career in marine biology when the death of a family friend from cancer convinced him to go into medicine.
He ended up specializing in medical oncology, doing a PhD in medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, where he met his wife, Connie, also a distinguished scientist. The couple, who have four children and 10 grandchildren, moved to Vancouver in 1974 when Connie Eaves was offered a job at the BC Cancer Agency, where she still works. Eaves joined his wife at the cancer agency a few years later and in 1985 became the head of hematology at UBC and Vancouver General Hospital, where he spent nearly two decades building B.C.'s Leukemia Bone Marrow Transplant program.
In 1981, with funding raised by Terry Fox, Eaves founded the Terry Fox Laboratory for cancer research. The lab became a specialist in making the hormones and tissue culture reagents for growing stem cells, so it started Media Preparation Services, which made and sold the products to other labs.
"You never have enough money to do research," Eaves said, "so to make additional money to support our research, we started selling things that we made."
In 1993, Eaves spun off Media Preparation Services into a private company, Stemcell Technologies. Stemcell does not make stem cells per se. It makes the media and processes for growing them in other labs. Ninety-five per cent of the company's market is outside of Canada.
"We provide the picks and shovels for the stem-cell gold rush," Eaves said.
In 2006, Eaves was forced into mandatory retirement from UBC and Vancouver Hospital and focused on growing Stemcell Technologies, which is now a group of companies.
When he saw that the bone marrow registry used by North American hospitals was antiquated and cumbersome, he created STEMSOFT Software Inc., which makes software for managing data in bone marrow centres, cord blood banks, cellular therapy companies and tumour and tissue repositories.
Another spinoff is Malachite Management Inc., which does society and meeting management for professionals in the sciences.
Eaves has grown Stemcell Technologies organically, and feels one of the failings of the local biotech sector has been its impulse to go public to go big. He has watched as some local biotechs failed entirely, while others were acquired.
"Success for a company here is to have it sold to an American company," Eaves said. "A few people make some money, and everybody loses their jobs. Investors, they have three to five years and then they want to get their money out. 'So what's your exit strategy?' Exit strategy for me is death."
One of Eaves' greatest accomplishments as a scientist resulted in one of his greatest disappointments as an entrepreneur. The Leukemia Bone Marrow Transplant program he founded was already running when Eaves' new treatment for growing healthy stem cells in leukemia patients began attracting national attention.
Like many scientific discoveries, the Eaves culture-purging process resulted from a failed experiment. He had been trying to grow cancerous stem cells from leukemia patients, but the cells kept dying. The few healthy stem cells from the marrow lived, however. He was therefore able to grow healthy stem cells, which could be transplanted back into a patient after chemotherapy. Because that eliminated the need for bone marrow donors, there was a sudden demand for the treatment.
"People were phoning us from around the world wanting to come to Vancouver to get treatment," he said.
Eaves asked Vancouver General Hospital to provide two beds so he could treat patients from outside of Canada. The plan was to charge $300,000 per patient. The treatment could be done for $100,000.
"We would make a $200,000 profit on every patient, and all that was going to go into research," Eaves said. "The businessmen on the board said, 'This is a wonderful idea.' And the government appointees on the board said, 'This is the thin edge of the wedge of the dreaded two-tiered American health-care system.' So they turned it down."
A new drug eventually came along that treats chronic myelogenous leukemia, meaning there was no longer a need for the culture-purging process. For Eaves, his inability to create a private clinic underscores how attitudes toward private health care in Canada can squelch innovation and investment.
"We in Canada have a great socialized health-care insurance system," he said. "What we don't have is a good delivery system. We have this bottleneck. We think we're containing costs, but we're not. People die on the waiting list. Here we've got a great educational system, but it's said a quarter of all medical graduates quietly leave Canada within a few years of graduation. Why can't I get investors and start a hospital? There's a lot of money in the Pacific Rim. How do we turn it into a revenue generator instead of an expense? We want to make medical tourism work for us. We could have a wonderful health-care system."
Asked if he plans to retire, Eaves said he and his wife like working too much. Even when they're at their vacation home in Tofino, they work.
"We're workaholics."
