In some ways, Julia Levy hasn’t changed much since the 1980s, when she would sweat it out in the laboratory at QLT Inc. (TSX:QLT; Nasdaq:QLTI), the most successful biotech company to ever come out of British Columbia.
BIV’s 2010 Influential Women in Business Lifetime Achievement Award winner doesn’t get in the lab anymore but she remains active in the industry and still gets a rush from being involved in the drug-development process.
“If you’re a scientist, it’s getting there that is the excitement of the expedition,” she said over the phone from her getaway home in Lund, B.C. That excitement is typically made more acute by the near-death financial circumstances that most early-stage companies find themselves in.
“QLT was much more fun as a young company coming along than it was when it was profitable,” she said.
Her bias toward the early phase of the drug-development cycle is evident in her current involvement in the biotech industry.
She is a director or adviser to nearly a dozen early-stage biotech companies, including North Vancouver’s viDA Therapeutics Inc. – which is developing a new class of drugs for treating age-related conditions associated with chronic inflammation and tissue degeneration – and Vancouver’s Valocor Therapeutics Inc., which is spinning off assets from QLT to develop treatments for untreatable skin conditions.
Daniel Wattier, Valocor’s president and CEO, first met Levy 10 years ago when he sat down with her for a job interview at QLT.
He got the job and has worked closely with Levy since.
“There are a lot of entrepreneurs locally and in Canada who have had their successes and, as long as there is something in it for them, they’ll help you out,” said Wattier.
“Julia isn’t like that. She is investing a lot of her time and energy into what we’re doing and she doesn’t need to.”
In 1981, Levy and some colleagues spun QLT off from the University of British Columbia where Levy was a professor of microbiology and held a doctorate degree in immunology.
The company initially worked on developing some of UBC’s immunology and diagnostic assets.
QLT found its true footing in 1987 when David Dolphin, a UBC scientist and expert in the field of photosensitive chemistry, joined the company.
It was Levy’s experience in immunology and Dolphin’s experience in chemistry that would eventually result in the invention and commercialization of Visudyne, the most successful drug created in British Columbia, both from a financial and therapeutic perspective.
At its peak in 2004, the light-activated treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness in seniors, generated US$480 million for QLT.
It has treated blindness in more than two million people.
Levy was CSO as well as CEO for a time at QLT.
Betraying a disdain for finance and for the type of job responsibility that would keep her awake at night, Levy isn’t sure that, if she were to do it all over again, she would have accepted the top executive position at QLT.
“I really never ever enjoyed being a CEO,” she said. “You don’t have a life. If you are going to be good at that kind of job, you have to give yourself to it 24-7.”
Levy had continued to mentor QLT’s clinical and scientific staff until January 2008, when she left to become more involved with other companies that she felt would be better served by her expertise and connections that come with being supported by Levy.
Wattier said that Levy, as chair of Valocor, also provides the company with a level of credibility that would take years for it to establish on its own.
“Levy is one of those few entrepreneurs who took something from the bench and took it right through into a commercial success and into a publicly traded company,” said Wattier.
“There are only so many biotech products in all of the industry that have made money, and Visudyne is one of those.”
Levy’s a board member of Toronto’s Cannasat Therapeutics (TSX-V:CTH), which is developing pain treatments from cannabinoids, the active drug in marijuana.
And she still finds time to contribute to other fields outside the realm of biotech: she’s a board member of the Vancouver Opera and of EcoTrust Canada, a non-profit that promotes conservation-based development.
The fondest memories of her career are typically moments shared with other scientists in the lab.
“Those years in the late ’90s were magic,” she said. “They were absolutely the most exciting years of my life.”
Doing the boards circuit may not be as exciting as having Eureka moments in the lab, but she’s nonetheless contributing to the sector.
She still turns to the biotech sector to stave off something she has a seemingly passionate disdain for: boredom.
“I’ve been quite successful at avoiding it.” •
