QLT: Back to the Drawing Board

QLT Vancouver | BCBusiness
B.C.’s first biotech firm to hit the big time is selling its most lucrative drug and heading back to square one.

It appears that QLT, the first of Vancouver’s biotech companies to hit it big, is shrinking down to its initial role as a drug developer.

This week, Vancouver-based QuadraLogic Technologies sold off its flagship product, Visudyne, a treatment for age-related blindness, for US$112.5 million.

That’s a pathetic number, considering that Visudyne takes aim at one of the Western world’s most growing medical problems — Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) — which is projected to increase radically as the population ages.

But then, QLT has been having a hard time of it as competition appeared and sales flatlined amidst a series of strategy and management changes. Even as recently as this past spring, a shareholder proxy battle resulted in the election of a new board, the replacement of several executives, and now, another strategy.

This time it involves selling off the company’s product line, greatly reducing staff (from 214 to 68) and retreating to QLT’s beginnings as an R&D-focused drug development company. It’s planning to concentrate on a new product which is about to begin clinical trials.

Biotech is always an ultra-competitive, crap-shoot, business -— it can take years to develop a product, which then can flop or have a brief heyday until it’s copied by others. It’s no wonder that most drugs are developed (or bought) by very large pharmaceutical companies.

But QLT did manage to beat the trend for some time. QLT’s beginnings go back to 1981 when it was spun off from UBC research as QuadraLogic Technologies, headed by Dr. Julia Levy. It took another 18 years before the product was approved for distribution, but the company’s fortunes then soared. At one point its market cap was $7.5 billion.

QLT was one of B.C.’s greatest industrial achievements, creating an industry in the province that still exists.

Famous business sage Peter Drucker once predicted that the average life of a company would be no more than 30 years, so QLT beat that by one year. That’s not a bad record at all.

Also, the company has the proud legacy of creating the B.C. biotech and drug development sector almost all by itself.

QLT dared to be great, which is not a common trait among B.C. businesses.