Vancouver-headquartered adMare Bioinnovations invested $92 million in federal funding over four years to help build and scale numerous Canadian life sciences companies, says Gordon McCauley (photo at right),  president and CEO of the not-for-profit organization.

In total, adMare has helped to create 39 companies that have raised $2.5 billion in real risk capital, have a combined value of $5.8 billion, and have created about 1,000 jobs across Canada, he said in an interview with Research Money.

“We’re really interested in [technologies] that are commercially relevant, from which we can build Canadian companies,” McCauley said.

Last month, adMare announced the creation of Montreal-based Ocythera, a new biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing innovative therapies for rare bone diseases.

adMare also co-founded and seeded Vancouver-based Abdera Therapeutics in 2021, to work with AbCellera to develop next-generation targeted alpha therapies (using high-energy alpha-emitting radioisotopes) for cutting-edge cancer treatments.

Abdera utilizes AbCellera’s antibody discovery platform to target cancers, focusing on delta-like ligand 3, a radioisotope target in small cell lung cancer. 

McCauley said adMare is a company builder that helps overcome early-stage challenges including financing, infrastructure and talent to build strong, investable, Canadian life science companies. adMare is not a granting agency.

adMare identifies highly scientifically differentiated innovations with strong commercialization potential and invests pre-seed capital along with industrial R&D, intellectual property and business development expertise to generate key scientific data, create value and build the operating structure needed to raise the next round of funding with venture capital investors.

McCauley said adMare invests in very early-stage life sciences companies where private VC capital isn’t yet prepared to go. Early-stage investment, he noted, “is essential for the growth of the life science ecosystem in Canada.”

However, 80 percent of venture capital in Canada’s life sciences sector comes from the U.S, according to an adMare report in 2025.

“This is a problem because what it means is that of the $4.5 billion put into public research every year, 80 percent of the value capture from that research happens in the United States,” McCauley said.

As companies grow, Canadian investment participation falls from 42 percent in early-stage rounds to just 24 percent in later-stage growth deals, “highlighting a structural gap in Canada’s investor ecosystem,” the report said.

Canada has a good venture capital community, but comparing Canada’s GDP with the U.S., Canada’s VC capital community should be about three times its current size, McCauley said. “There should be an incremental billion-and-a-half dollars a year invested in Canadian venture in life sciences.”

Given that most of the VC investment in Canada’s life sciences companies comes from the U.S., adMare BioInnovations helps fill a gap in Canadian VC investment.

McCauley also pointed out that, according to research by the Business Development Bank of Canada and research by the Royal Bank, over the last 10 years the life sciences sector has been the best-performing VC investment category in terms of return on investment.

What did adMare invest in?

AdMare’s investments help to generate the key scientific validation data, company value and operating structure needed to make research discoveries more attractive for follow-on investment, clinical development and commercialization.

During the four-year period of $92 million of federal funding for adMare – announced in March 2022 – the organization said:

• Approximately $50 million was used to generate key scientific validation data for R&D projects, achieving more than 100 critical go-no-go milestones to advance 60 projects along the path to commercialization in collaboration with more than 30 academic partners and small to medium-sized companies.
• About $25 million was used to provide direct Seed/Series investments to more than a dozen companies.
• Approximately $10 million was used to provide lab and research services, collaboration platforms and related activities to support company creation and growth.
• $7 million was used to develop and deliver industry-ready talent training and executive leadership development programs to more than 2,000 individuals.

adMare helps strength Canada’s pipeline to meet the objectives of:

• Making research discoveries more attractive for clinical development and commercialization.
• Providing research and training for building the pool of industry-ready, highly qualified personnel.
• Fueling and strengthening the reputation of Canada’s life sciences community to attract investment.

As an example of how adMare works, Ocythera, the new company adMare launched last month, started as a research collaboration project with Queens University. Ocythera originated from groundbreaking research by Dr. Martin Petkovich at Queens.

adMare worked closely with Queens and Patkovich over three years to undertake research projects that provided pre-clinical scientific validation.

As the program advanced along the path to commercialization, adMare also supported a strengthened intellectual property and operating structure, making it attractive for follow-on funding.

The companies adMare has helped support and build include ZymeWorks, Bellus Health, Inversago Pharma, Flowsonics, and Evolved Therapeutics.

“We’ve made consistent repeated investments and we’ve enjoyed a fairly significant return because of those investments,” McCauley said.

adMare’s investments have raised more than $2.5 billion in risk capital investing alongside adMare, or a leverage of about 14 to 1.

If economic multiplier effects are considered with adMare’s portfolio companies, the return on every dollar adMare has invested is more than $5 billion, or about a leverage of about $24 for every dollar invested, he added.

“We are better than dollar for dollar so far. Every dollar that we put out, we are generating a dollar of return which means we can continue to reinvest,” McCauley said.

adMare fully re-invests its returns back into the Canadian ecosystem to help translate the next scientific breakthroughs into globally competitive Canadian companies, he said.

McCauley said adMare doesn’t track revenue growth of the companies it invests in, because with investments made at a very early stage, most of the companies are typically not generating revenue.

For example, adMare invested in Zymeworks a decade ago, so hasn’t tracked its growth in revenue and number of employees.

Zymeworks now has its first product on the market to treat adults with previously treated, unresectable or metastatic HER2-positive (IHC 3+) biliary tract cancer.

When it comes to jobs, McCauley noted that adMare’s investments have created about 1,000 jobs across Canada. “That’s a good output.”

Value created by adMare’s investments

McCauley said adMare’s investments have enabled significant value creation, including:

• More than 80 new patent filings
• The initiation and advancement of nearly 20 clinical trials.
• Stronger executive management teams.
• Investable intellectual property and operating foundations.

“Towards the goal of building strong, investable Canadian life science companies, this value creation has made these companies more attractive to venture capital and corporate investors,” he said.

adMare’s funding also supported companies that have signed significant partnerships and/or acquisitions by global pharmaceutical companies.

This includes Bellus Health, which was acquired by GSK for about US$2 billion.

It also includes Inversago Pharma (which received seed/series investment), which was acquired by Denmark-based Novo Nordisk for $1.1 billion to advance the technology through clinical trials and provide a global market reach.

“Exits like Inversago showcase the ROI (return on investment) potential of life science investments,” McCauley said.

“This should help to encourage more domestic (institutional) investment in later-stage life science companies, which is critical to capturing more value in Canada and smoothing the pathway towards establishing more of these emerging companies as domestic anchor firms.”

adMare’s returns from these exits enable a path to adMare’s corporate sustainability as well as the sustainability of Canada’s life sciences ecosystems, McCauley said.

“adMare’s returns are directly re-invested back into advancing the next scientific breakthrough in Canada. We are helping to build a critical mass of Canadian companies that provide us with more shots on go.”

McCauley said in selecting companies to support, adMare relies on a 30-member team, each of whom has an average 20 to 25 years’ of experience in the biotech marketplace across all domains.

This team understands what is a scientifically differentiated technology with commercial potential, and knows the key ingredients for success, he said. “They’ve actually done this and worked [in the marketplace]. “Each person has deep commercial experience.”

“We are putting money in today to reach certain milestones and when those milestones are achieved, you see [other milestones] and you're bringing in other investors along the way,” McCauley said.

“Other people come along to say ‘We want to invest in these,’ and then obviously as things continue to succeed and continue to attract other capital, we continue to invest as well,” he said.

adMare typically invests in companies working in oncology and neurology, as well as “opportunity” companies that doesn’t fit those categories, but have a technology with commercial potential.

adMare’s investment aligns very closely with those areas in which Canada has a competitive advantage, McCauley said. For example, this includes companies in Vancouver working on nanoparticles and antibodies, along with neuro-specific technologies in Montreal and Toronto.

Startups in life sciences require intensive capital investment at the early stage, yet investing very early is the hardest stage to invest because of the high risks, so adMare fills that need, he said. Also, adMare tries very hard to catalyze its early-stage investment, to attract follow-on investment.

“This is this is a very capital-intensive business and one of the challenges is that the mistakes that you make early in this business are really difficult, expensive or impossible to fix later on down the road,” he said.

“And one of the challenges is that some of those mistakes are caused by not having enough capital,” he added.

“In a typical venture environment, you want 20 or 25 percent of your investments to make up for all of the other ones that don't work and you want to kill them quickly – the ones that don't work,” McCauley added.

“I think our team does a pretty good job of killing things quickly when they don't work and we're closer to about 35 or 40 percent of things that are generating a return.”

Building strong leadership talent and providing infrastructure

As an investor, AdMare said it recognizes that building strong Canadian companies also requires:

• Strong leadership talent – adMare developed industry-ready talent and leadership development programs that cultivate the required skills, networks and vision to meet that objective.
• Availability of move-in ready lab facilities –adMare offers more than 200,000-square feet of turnkey lab space across Canada that meet the specific financial and scientific needs of early-stage companies.

Eight years ago, adMare created its Executive Institute, a 10-month, cohort-based program (which has always been 50 percent women and 50 percent men) for no more than 22 people a year. Participants must get signoff to attend the Institute from their company’s CEO, attesting that they have the potential to join the C-suite in the future, McCauley said.

The Institute meets for three days every year in various cities, including Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.

The program now has about 150 alumni in countries across the country, he said.

adMare also launches and then hands off to its partners other training programs, such as its bioinnovation science program recently taken over by the Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences, a workforce training organization headquartered in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Building anchor companies in Canada takes aspirational leadership – somebody saying,  ‘I want to do it here,’” McCauley noted.

The reality is it’s hard to build anchor companies in Canada and it’s the exception rather than the norm, he said.

There’s a strong life sciences community in Vancouver because the QLT Inc. biotech company, under former CEO and president Julia Levy, anchored that local ecosystem, he added. Similar anchor company support helped establish and grow Montreal’s thriving life sciences community.

It takes visionary leaders like Carl Hansen (founding CEO of AbCellera), Tamara Muhammad (CEO of Aspect BioSystems), and Ian Mortimer Hudson (president and CEO at Xenon Pharmaceuticals) to commit to building an anchor company in Canada, McCauley said.

However, with the life sciences industry, capital finds the good science, he added. There is more venture capital available for life sciences globally than ever before in history, he pointed out.

“So if you're not getting enough of it [VC capital], especially in a place where Canada has such a strong scientific reputation, I think it tells you it's about how you're organizing that science, how you're presenting it or how you're interrogating it in a way to make it attractive for other investors.”

Ten years ago, McCauley said, the thinking in Canada was the country can’t have a life sciences industry because there’s not enough capital and other opportunities.

adMare BioInnovations’ investments are helping to change that perspective and the reality, he said.

“I think my colleagues [at adMare) have helped the ecosystem look at itself and say, ‘If we organize ourselves properly, if we allocate our capital properly, and if we focus on commercially relevant things, we can do it here,’” McCauley said.

“I think my colleagues have done a really good job of playing an important part of that growth.”

Federal Budget 2021 committed over $2.2 billion over seven years to Canada’s Biomanufacturing and Life Sciences Strategy.

Also, Budget 2025 prioritized the life sciences sector as a as a specific directive for the $1-billion Venture Capital Catalyst Initiative, the expansion of eligibility for the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit program, and the commitment to creating a more competitive regime to protect and enhance Canadian intellectual property, combined with the dual-use technologies commitments.

McCauley said adMare could be financially self-sustaining today, but with a more limited impact. To continue the broader impact adMare has made, another federal investment would be required.

“Frankly, it makes tons of sense and aligns well with current public policy priorities,” McCauley said.

See also: Canada’s life sciences sector is crucial to growing economy but challenges must be addressed

Canada and life sciences sector face an emergency that requires prioritizing resilience, innovation and self-reliance

The hard pivot: anchoring a world-leading Canadian life sciences industry