On Target

Adam Brown walks into a room that looks like your typical chemistry lab. It’s one of several that are part of 48Hour Discovery, a spin-off company of the University of Alberta. There are warnings, as expected in a place that houses many complex chemicals. But these chemicals have the potential to aid in the discovery of countless new drugs.

There are several test tubes lined up against one wall. Brown picks one up and holds what in decades past would have required rows upon rows of vials in a giant facility.

“Inside here there are about a billion molecule drug leads,” Brown, the vice president of Business Development for 48Hour Discovery, explains. “Say if you have cancer, you have a tumour somewhere and…those cancer cells, on the outside of them, are expressing a certain type of protein. And you take that protein and you dip it in our proprietary vial and see what sticks to it. It’s like going fishing.”

It’s a bit more complicated than fishing, he admits with a laugh. But these not-so-simple fishing trips have drawn the attention of world-renowned companies, which hire 48Hour Discovery to find the molecules that become the next generation of diagnostics and therapeutics for a variety of diseases and indications. And the company also creates its own internal drugs.

Before Brown joined the team full time, he was consulting with the company to get it ready for the TNT Investment Summit in late 2022. The summit provides capital to early-stage tech start-ups.

“There was stiff competition and I thought: There’s no way we’re going to win it. And then you win it, and it’s just like… oh wow, it’s really exciting. Different, but similar to winning a Juno,” says Brown, a Top 40 Under 40 alumnus. He’s speaking from experience as a former member of Striker, which won a Juno for Heavy Metal Album of the Year in 2020.

Securing TNT capital meant 48Hour Discovery could fund its initial campaigns, which helped identify early leads to treat cancer, says Brown. It also helped the company build momentum. This year, the company was awarded a $100,000 grant (with Dr. Frank Wuest) from the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s Breakthrough Fund to advance its work in early-stage cancer research.

The company has worked with RayzeBio, which was recently acquired for $4.1 billion USD for its targeted cancer treatment portfolio; 48 Hour Discovery’s worked with Fusion Pharmaceuticals on a treatment for cancer tumours; and with the support from GlycoNet, it was hired by Merck, a global pharmaceutical company, to accelerate drug development programs and help address unmet medical needs. The company also collaborated with David Vocadlo of Simon Fraser University to understand the regulation of OGT — an enzyme that helps maintain overall health — with the discovery of peptides that could potentially lead to new treatments.

These are just a few collaborations — most can’t be mentioned due to non-disclosure agreements. “There are names you would definitely know,” Brown says.

There are a number of other peptide discovery companies out there — but they are not all able to screen billions of complete compounds like 48Hour Discovery. Currently, the company goes through 10 billion molecules in a week, and its system provides much more targeted therapy. In cancer treatments, rather than old-school methods that simply target all cell growth, a specific molecule found by 48Hour Discovery would help identify the locations of cancer cells and destroy them.

What might have taken months in the past and millions of dollars now can take 48 hours and a fraction of the cost, says founder and U of A professor, Ratmir Derda, whose research is known internationally.

“We’re riding this wave of first the computer revolution, which makes computation cheaper, and cheaper and cheaper — and then the parallel genetic revolution that made gene sequencing cheaper, and cheaper and cheaper. And we take both of them, and we just sprinkle chemistry on top. If we link chemistry to both of these advances, we can go 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times cheaper just because we’re repurposing the advances there,” says Derda, who won the Scientific Achievement and Innovation Award from BioAlberta in 2021.

Prior to the start of the company in 2017, Derda, a Top 40 Under 40 alumnus, was working on some academic collaborations in his own lab. But his passion for chemistry goes all the way back to his childhood in Ukraine. Derda says he competed in the Science Olympiads — events where students compete in various fields of science — and toggled between the first and second spot in the country. His top rival was a childhood friend.

“The teacher said: You don’t have to come to classes anymore; just focus on more growth. The room to grow was much bigger than the classroom,” says Derda.

He took that idea of growth and still applies it. While he sees the incredible importance of research — he also believes it’s really important to see that research becomes something concrete that can actually reach the public.

Nowadays, his calendar is packed with meetings from morning to night. But he doesn’t want to call his work a job. “I just do these two things that I enjoy,” says Derda, referring to his work as a U of A professor and with the company.

Many of the strongest universities in the world — Harvard, Stanford, MIT — have spin-off companies, says Derda. And his goal is to be one of those who can strike the right balance between academics and translational research.

The week prior to our interview he’d lectured at a University in Poland and a couple weeks later, he was going to Japan as a world-renowned subject matter expert on innovative cancer treatments.

In the quiet of the plane on the way to these lectures he finally gets a few hours to write.

“It’s something that I started to miss — you can get lost in the minutiae of the company details. And I start to miss writing grants and papers and fighting with reviewers,” says Derda. “That’s where I decided I need to give the reins to a professional [and] stay close enough that, if a machine breaks down, I can go back to my roots.”

Last year, he hired Rick Finnegan as CEO of 48Hour Discovery.

While Finnegan lives in Boston, he travels to the U of A for a couple weeks per month and often goes to Toronto, where he meets with investors, including those he’s met through JLABS, a prestigious accelerator. JLABS is run by Johnson & Johnson Innovation and is one of the most competitive and difficult-to-access biotech accelerators in the world. 48Hour Discovery was recently asked to join, opening doors to highly targeted opportunities, connections, a mentor, programming, training and events.

“Last year, we were basically a break-even company, maybe even a little north of break even,” say Finnegan. This year, he says, it will make a profit, which is unusual for such an early-stage biotech company.

“And we’re getting some good traction on the investment side right now,” says Finnegan. “It could do a lot to help Edmonton cement itself as a radiopharma capital.”

This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Edify