When Ariel Louwrier speaks about StressMarq Biosciences – the Victoria-based company he founded that specializes in the development and commercialization of high-quality bioreagents – in terms a layperson would understand, he draws an analogy to another era.
“If you think of drug discovery as a gold rush, we make the picks and shovels,” Louwrier said.
The company’s start during the 2008 financial crisis may not have been the most opportune time to launch an enterprise. Yet, Louwrier was able to secure a small amount of funding from the United Kingdom, which he used to invest in a variety of licences to make certain tools – at the time, antibodies specific to cancer research.
One of the hurdles he had to confront at the time was a strong Canadian dollar. For a company that exports its product and generally charges customers in US dollars, this posed challenges to the bottom line, until currency rates began to normalize after 2012.
“We were very draconian in terms of our spending, because the company was still very much in start-up mode,” he said. “I didn’t take a salary for the first three or four years, which helped the company. Of course, it didn’t help me.”
Eventually, around 2015, StressMarq considered developing a different type of product. Whereas it had once made antibodies, it decided to start making proteins instead. It moved into the neurodegenerative disease research space, as opposed to cancer, which, Louwrier noted, is a crowded area with companies from the United States, Europe and Asia vying against one another, making for a lot of products in the market.
“The genesis of it was literally a friend of a friend that asked us to try to make something, a very specific product. It’s unusual for people to undertake strange projects for free in this world,” Louwrier said. “I’d always felt that it was an interesting and useful thing to allocate about 10% of our time and money into doing exactly that, because you never know what’s going to come out in the end. We were asked and tasked specifically to make a particular protein aggregate – those are proteins that come together and they form, literally, an aggregate.”
The artificial protein aggregates that StressMarq makes are comparable in many ways – though not always the same – to what forms in the human brain as neurodegenerative diseases progress, whether it’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or ALS. They are all different proteins, but the process is roughly the same.
“For us, the task has always been to try to make something that is as biologically relevant as possible for the researchers because they use that material to create the model,” Louwrier said. “The model is essentially a version of the diseased brain, but in a much more simplistic form. Then, researchers can proceed and do their work on the model. They’ll have drug candidates. They may have different treatment regimes, as well. But they work on an artificial model, and we produce the products for them.”
The timing for StressMarq to move into a different arena was good. Dollars were beginning to pour into research for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, including money from the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC, the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
“We’ve ended up in a position where it makes sense to try to find, not necessarily cures, but treatments that can extend the time period for patients whilst they still have the vast majority of what you think of as typical cognitive abilities,” Louwrier said.
Continuing growth
Beginning in a 150-square-foot office on Douglas Street in Victoria, Louwrier hired his first employee in 2008 and produced a small array of products. These days, StressMarq employs 27 people, in 9,000 square feet allocated through six different suites in a building in Victoria’s Oaklands neighbourhood.
By Louwrier’s account, StressMarq is likely the largest biotechnology company from a laboratory perspective in the city and certainly the largest that is private.
“There’s no government funds, there’s no venture capital funds in here. It’s a completely self-defined and self-financing business,” he said.
StressMarq was not shaken by the pandemic because it was one of the entities governments wanted to keep open, even though it was not involved with COVID-related research.
This year, in a turbulent economic situation, with tariffs often changing, StressMarq has not been impacted for the most part, aside from a couple of minor exceptions. Louwrier said StressMarq’s customers have not been affected by the macroeconomic volatility, or the furloughs that occurred during the US government shutdown.
As the industry space and its technologies become more mainstream, Louwrier envisages a bright future for the firm, and he suspects the company will long outlast him when he decides to retire – whenever that may be.
Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.