Vantage Points: Anne Stevens explains how Canada almost lost AbCellera to the US

AbCellera wants to be BC’s life sciences anchor company. It almost didn’t happen.

AbCellera might be one of the most recognizable life sciences companies in British Columbia, but according to vice-president of business development Anne Stevens, it once considered leaving Canada.

As the creator of a drug discovery platform whose antibodies have treated over 2.5 million patients, AbCellera has repeatedly questioned whether BC—and Canada—provide it the right environment for long-term growth. 

“We’ve seen those companies exit too early, typically because the talent doesn’t exist for that next stage of evolution of the company, or the capital isn’t available, or the infrastructure isn’t here.”

“There was, of course, a fiduciary duty to question whether Canada is the right jurisdiction to grow and to build roots in,” Stevens said on the Vantage Points panel at BetaKit Town Hall: Vancouver last week.

Despite the fact that AbCellera’s team is “stubbornly” patriotic, in Stevens’s words, sometimes the answer to that question was “no.”

One of the company’s earliest government contracts was with the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as part of a pandemic preparedness initiative

When the answer did lean towards scaling outside of Canada, she said the team would reach out to provincial and federal governments with a clear message: “We have a big vision; we know we can do something special. We’re Canadian. Help us stay here.”

To Stevens, BC has all the ingredients for innovation. “We have some fantastic academic institutions, some great research coming out of it, and we’ve always been really good at starting companies,” she said.

AbCellera is a prime example. The company spun out of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2012, where its CEO Carl Hansen was a faculty member. UBC alone has spawned 260 companies based on its research.

While BC excels at launching startups, Stevens noted, scaling them to the next level is a different story. Too often, promising companies don’t make it past the early stages.

“Historically, we’ve seen those companies exit too early, typically because the talent doesn’t exist for that next stage of evolution of the company, or the capital isn’t available, or the infrastructure isn’t here,” Stevens explained.

The problem in her sector comes down to incentivizing its high-growth companies to stay. Stevens has observed the federal and provincial governments take a keen interest in understanding how to better support the life sciences industry. Last year, her own company received $300 million from the federal and provincial governments to support its $701-million biotech campus in Vancouver.

But beyond those gains, Stevens argued that policies and incentives that support research and development (R&D), intellectual property (IP) retention, and revenue growth need to better match the realities of scaling in life sciences.

RELATED: AbCellera breaks ground on new Vancouver HQ as it plans to hire hundreds

“The average life sciences company takes 15 years to see proper commercial revenues,” she said. “You can exit earlier through licences and things, but it’s a very long pathway. It takes a billion dollars to get there. You’re going to need external capital. You’ll probably need to go public very early—pre-revenue.”

She argued that current federal programs, like the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit, don’t align with these long timelines, and this poses a challenge to companies trying to grow in the sector.

“You don’t get the cash credit component once you go public,” she said, telling BetaKit separately that such credits are often meaningless for early-stage companies.

Beyond R&D, Stevens also pointed to incentives that could keep IP in the country, such as a patent box regime, which would tax patent revenues differently from other commercial revenues.

Towards the end of the panel, speakers were asked to shout out one person or company in the BC tech ecosystem. Stevens picked one from her own sector: Canadian physicist and biochemist Pieter Cullis, who was responsible for developing the lipid nanoparticle technology that makes it possible to deliver mRNA vaccines. Speaking with BetaKit before the panel, she predicted that Cullis would be the next Canadian to win a Nobel prize.

“He had this idea,” she said. “He recognized the steps that it would need to take to actually commercialize that idea. He saw the applications for it, and he would start different companies that would focus on those different applications. It was the conviction, the foresight, the dedication, and the innovation that really has made a huge impact worldwide.”


On October 22, BetaKit Town Hall: Vancouver continued the pulse check on Canadian innovation, policy, and optimism.

Please enjoy this selection of highlights and insights from the town hall:


Photo courtesy Eric Ennis from Renovo Agency for BetaKit.

Leave a Comment