BC Business
Eaves remortgaged his home and took a government loan to start his own business in 1993.
1. You founded Stemcell Technologies back in 1993. Can you tell me a little bit about that origin story?
The research in the Terry Fox Lab [which Eaves started with his wife in the early 1980s] was to support understanding leukemia, which is a major disease that we’re trying to treat with the bone marrow transplant program. We had developed some really good [technology] for growing blood-forming stem cells [which supports leukemia research] and people were asking for it, so we started selling that. And then in 1992, the BC Cancer Foundation board thought we should set up a company and grow it bigger, and so I did.
I bought the business from BC Cancer Foundation for $600,000—this was back in 93, that was quite a lot of money—I mortgaged my house, which I bought for $90,000 but which then was worth half a million because of the cost of housing going up in Vancouver. I also got a loan for half a million from the federal government (which we paid back), and that launched us in 1993.
2. Did you always know that you wanted to support cancer research?
Yeah. My friend’s mother died of breast cancer at an early age and I thought that’s really unfair. So I said, I’m going to devote my life to cancer, and I did that. I got a medical degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax and I did my PhD [in medical biophysics] at the University of Toronto.
I had started this fairly small company in 93, and I’ve been here for the last 30 years, building it into Canada’s largest biotech.
3. The company is doing well with year-over-year growth averaging 20 percent. What do you think has driven this success?
We have a great culture of being able to relate to our customers [who are scientists], and just be very helpful. Our tagline is ‘scientists helping scientists.’ And we live by that. Internally, we’re ‘colleagues helping colleagues.’ So it’s a very collaborative, friendly atmosphere that I have created here. And the reason for that, in my opinion, is that we don’t have any investors. See, investors just want to make money. And that’s not my goal. My goal is to make really good products that support cancer and other researchers to do their jobs better. And also to hire all these smart, young Canadians that love science.
4. Is that also connected to your decision to reinvest profits into the company?
Oh, yeah. I pay myself modestly and that’s not my goal, to make money personally. [The goal] is to put all the money back into the company and grow it to be huge.
5. Do you have anything special planned for the 30th anniversary?
We have made a $300,000 donation to the Terry Fox lab to celebrate our 30th anniversary, and they’re very appreciative of that. Of course, that’s where we started and giving back is what we’re able to do.
British Columbia is poised to become a major biotech centre. And my understanding is that there’s actually more biotech companies in British Columbia than anywhere else in Canada. And I think this is going to continue. We have some very interesting companies: Stemcell’s the largest, we’ve got Acuitas, which has made the packaging for the Pfizer vaccine for COVID. And we need to celebrate these things, right? We want to celebrate our local successes and other companies that are doing well, like Zymeworks and so on.
We’re going to become, I think, the centre of biopharmaceuticals development in Canada and we should be proud of that. And I think it’s important to celebrate that and make people more aware of it.
Last year we spent $76 million locally on B.C. companies supplying us and hired 700 people. And we have 650 internal training courses for our staff—we spend $3 million a year on just internal training. We have 118 patents—we’re all about patenting our discoveries.
Only 3 percent of our sales are in Canada; 97 percent are outside of Canada. We’re bringing in those export dollars. And over the last 30 years, we’ve contributed $5.5 billion to the Canadian GDP. So, we’re pretty proud of what we’re doing.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.