Dr Mary Martin was barely retired for four weeks in early 2016 when she was approached by fellow pharmaceutical veteran Eunan Maguire to see if she would be interested in a new position. 

After 30 years in drug delivery technology culminating in a senior role with Horizon Therapeutics, a $24 billion Nasdaq-listed firm, Martin was ready for a break.

“I announced to my friends and colleagues in Horizon the truth at the time, which was that I intended to retire,” she tells me. “I had even joined the gym.” 

But there was something about the excitement in her old friend’s voice that prompted her to listen. Martin and Eunan Maguire had worked together previously in Elan, and both had gone on to have separate, successful careers.

Martin knew that Eunan Maguire had a talent for spotting promising pharma and biotech companies, and as he told her about a four-year-old company in Maynooth called Avectas, she wondered had he found another one. Avectas was trying to beat certain cancers using innovative cell engineering technology, and Martin couldn’t help but be interested. Maguire asked Martin if she would meet with the two co-founders of Avectas, Dr Shirley O’Dea and his brother Dr Michael Maguire. 

“I knew Eunan from old,” Martin said. “I went to Maynooth and met with the team. At that stage, the business was really starting to look at advanced intracellular delivery. 

“I was intrigued by what Avectas was doing and what its ambitions were. I’m a drug delivery person to my core, and this really represents the next wave of drug delivery challenges. How do you actually deliver genetic material inside a cell to modify that cell so that the cell is the therapy?”

After meeting with Avectas, Martin decided to forget about retirement. Instead, she went on to become chair of the company. 

This is the story of how Avectas went on to raise over $40 million mainly from Irish investors to date, where it wants to go next, and how it believes it can play a role in curing many types of cancer. 

Business meets science

Avectas was founded in 2012 by Dr Shirley O’Dea and Dr Michael Maguire after the idea for the business came out of research being undertaken by O’Dea at Maynooth University. The two co-founders were introduced by Tomás Ward, a biomedical engineer, who is now professor of data analytics in DCU. Back in the early 2000s, there had been a lot of interest in getting genetic material inside of cells to modify them, but investment in this area of research had cooled because it was so difficult. O’Dea’s research had honed in on intracellular delivery – how do you get things into cells – as being a key bottleneck to getting things progressing again. She started talking to Maguire about the whole area of cell therapies, which required a convergence of skills from science, engineering, biotechnology and even software development.

As they talked, they decided to form a company to try and work together on these ideas. What is now Avectas was born.

Maguire said his co-founder O’Dea was “pure science,” while he was “not an academic”. He has a PhD in drug delivery from Maynooth and a degree in biomedical engineering, but his career has been more commercial. “I’m a half technical person, half businessperson,” he explained. This combination of attributes between its co-founders helped Avectas develop its first product, quickly bringing a spray technology to market by 2015.

“There is a long history of inhaled or atomised drug delivery brought about by spray,” Michael Maguire told me. “We started by developing and commercialising a suite of products in this area which we brought to market and are now in 200-odd labs globally called Spraybase.”

This product was niche, but very useful in areas like tissue regeneration and fighting eye infections.

However, the co-founders of Avectas had much greater ambitions to solve larger problems. “As we were building our first business we could see a rising interest in cell therapy,” Maguire said. “We could see there was a much bigger opportunity there.

“Our first business brought together biologists and engineers working together… it was like a dress rehearsal for Avectas.”

Avectas pivoted towards its main interest today, which is developing a patented, non-viral, cell engineering technology to engineer therapeutic cells, at scale, while maintaining optimal cell functionality. This was a much bigger opportunity that could save or hasten the recovery of millions of cancer patients.

A back story with Elan

Eunan Maguire and Mary Martin go back decades. Martin joined Elan in 1989, while Maguire joined it in 1997. They’d experienced the heights of Elan as it grew from its original business in drug delivery to becoming the largest company on the Irish Stock Exchange. At one stage, Elan had a potentially ground-breaking pipeline of products in areas like Alzheimer’s, MS and Crohn’s Disease, but in 2002 its share price crashed amid questions about its accounting practices, leading to a series of crises for the firm. 

Neither Eunan Maguire nor Martin was to blame for Elan falling out of favour with investors. But they were part of a group of talented scientists and pharma business development experts who left the firm in 2003 as it retrenched under investment banker Kelly Martin, who was tasked with breaking-up the company and slashing costs. 

Martin and Maguire’s careers had diverged post-Elan but they’d stayed in touch as part of the Athlone company’s wide-ranging alumni network. Martin had worked closely for decades with the talented scientist Dr John Devane (Elan: 1981 – 2001) while Maguire had worked with the low-key but brilliant Seamus Mulligan (Elan: 1984-2004).

After Elan, Martin spent the next decade as a chief operating officer with AGI Therapeutics, and she helped steer this business to the stock market along with Devane. AGI had an €85 million valuation on the stock market in 2006, but it didn’t work out as well as hoped. The business was sold for just €6.6 million to Aravis Therapeutics in 2012 after it failed to attract a development partner and had disappointing trials for its treatment for irritable bowel syndrome.  

Devane and Martin then moved into senior positions with the parent company of Aravis Therapeutics called Vidara Therapeutics. The same year as the AGI transaction, Vidara had also bought an anti-inflammatory drug called Actimmune which is used to treat severe osteoporosis, a purchase that would turn out to be very shrewd. 

Martin took up the job as vice president of quality assurance, regulatory affairs and product development with Vidara, while Devane came in as chief science officer. Two years after they joined Vidara it was bought for $660 million in cash and shares by a multibillion-dollar Nasdaq listed company called Horizon Pharma, which specialises in treatments for arthritis, pain and inflammatory diseases. 

Martin became senior vice president with Horizon Pharma where she stayed until December 2015, when she announced plans to retire.

Meanwhile, Eunan Maguire took a different path. He co-founded a number of companies along with Seamus Mulligan and David Brabazon (Elan: 1995-2003). Based in a discreet office on Fitzwilliam Square the trio led by Mulligan have been hugely successful. In 2018 they sold Adapt Pharma, a leader in opioid overdose treatment, for $635 million. Another Mulligan led venture was Azur Pharma. This merged in 2011 with Jazz Pharmaceuticals in a $500 million deal. When Eunan Maguire approached Martin to become chair of Avectas, he told her that he planned to invest in the company alongside Mulligan.

Martin’s scientific background told her that Avectas was promising. But having such experienced investors backing the business was another lure. 

Raising money

As Avectas progressed its research, it realised it needed funding and expertise to develop its technology. With Martin on board as chair, it assembled an experienced board that includes Ann Brady, the president of Theravance Biopharma, and Barry Wohl, the chief business officer of Apnimed, which raised a $25 million Series B round in March to develop a treatment for sleep apnoea.

In 2018, Avectas received €2.1 million from the EU under its Horizon 2020 scheme. The EU money required the founders of Avectas and Martin to travel to Brussels to be grilled on their plans. “It was very competitive,” Martin says. “But it gave us funding for two years.”

The next year Avectas closed a $10 million seed round from Mulligan, Eunan Maguire and David Brabazon to develop its Solupore technology. This increases cell permeability, allowing cells to be taken out of sick people and returned to them after they have been genetically engineered to address their illness.

Maguire and Martin say the firm’s private investors have deep pockets and are prepared to be patient. Photo: Bryan Meade

In 2020, it raised $20 million, primarily from the same group of investors but also other angels, to allow it to continue to develop its product. Earlier this year, it took the lead in a consortium investing €7.23 million to scale cell therapy manufacturing in Ireland, including €4.4 million awarded from the Irish Government’s Disruptive Technology Innovation Fund. All of this funding has allowed Avectas to expand its team to 35 people, and it is hiring more.

The firm’s private investors have deep pockets and are prepared to be patient. “Eunan, David Brabazon, Seamus are very, very smart, insightful people,” Martin said. “We, the board and the management, very much run the business, but it’s good to know that we have investors like Seamus who are committed and see the value of what we’re doing.”

The business has no institutional investors to date, nor has it looked at the public markets, although Martin has stock market experience with Elan, AGI Therapeutics and Horizon. Is an IPO something that is in Avectas’ future? “It depends on the evolution of the company,” Martin said. “We are positioning ourselves well now for private equity funding, but ultimately perhaps going public.”

She said some competitors of Avectas had already gone public. “It’s not unknown for companies like us to do an IPO,” she said.

How far might an IPO be away? “It will be a few years away,” she replied. “Private equity could be nearer term.”

Michael Maguire said biotech companies were always thinking of more funding. “We are continually calibrating what our future needs will be to execute our plans,” he said. “We are very ambitious.”

Cutting-edge science

Avectas is essentially about drug delivery, but it does it in a more sophisticated way than was possible in Elan. The focus in Avectas is on managing cells themselves so that they can be manipulated or modified to fight diseases like cancer without being compromised or damaged in the process. This so-called cell and gene therapy is cutting edge, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun approving certain treatments in the field.

Michael Maguire told me that at the moment most of these treatments are autologous, which means that they involve a patient’s own cells. What this means is that a patient’s own blood is taken out and following a long and complex manufacturing process their T cells are engineered to better fight their cancer – and then returned to the body. This type of treatment is available in the United States and Britain, but not in Ireland. “We believe the next wave of cancer therapies are all going to require cells to be modified, cells to be engineered,” Michael Maguire said.

However, he added a lot had to happen first. “The scale of manufacturing must be substantially increased, the manufacturing cost per dose must dramatically decrease and the focus must shift from treatments using a patient’s own cells, autologous, to treatments based on cells from different sources, allogeneic,” he said. 

“Moving from autologous to allogeneic manufacturing will make therapy available to patients when needed.

“The Avectas Solupore Platform allows more sophisticated and less intrusive editing which has the potential to allow the treatment of solid tumours and bring cell therapy beyond the current domain of blood-based cancers.”

He said the cost of treatments would fall sharply as a result with large-scale integrated production and decreased processing time. “This is absolutely the next wave,” Michael Maguire said. “We’re at the very beginning. It will power an almost bewildering array of new therapies, which are being developed in research institutes around the world based on the modification of cells, or cell engineering.”

Michael Maguire said there were only about seven or eight commercialised cell therapies for cancer, primarily of the blood, so that was Avectas’ initial focus but in the long term, its technology would help many more types of cancer.

How far away are this next generation of treatments? “I think it’s half a decade to a decade, and I also don’t think that autologous therapies will stop dead.  I think there will be a large overlap period. It’s horses for courses. I think there will be some therapies which will be very well suited to an allogeneic product and there will be some other therapies that will continue to exist as autologous products,” he said.

Avectas has signed three major agreements to develop its technology with the Centre for Commercialisation of Regenerative Medicine in Canada, Florida-based immunotherapy firm Vycellix, and The Simon Laboratory in the University of California Davis. “These are validating partnerships and they’re partnerships to help with the development of the technology in parallel with our efforts,” Michael Maguire said. “More hands using the technology means more data being generated. A huge part of our business activity is finding the right partners.”

He said Avectas’s chief business officer in Cambridge, Massachusetts Daniel Castro was working with him and Martin on finding these partnerships. “Everybody is learning,” Maguire said. “This area is still so young.

“It’s not just about having the best technology. You also have to be able to partner with the best companies to actually develop therapeutic products.”

Scientific Advisory Board

Avectas has both scientific and technical advisory boards as well as its main board. Professor Mark Lowdell, director of cellular therapy at University College London, chairs its scientific advisory board, which also includes Bruce Levine, of the University of Pennsylvania, who is the co-inventor of the first FDA-approved gene therapy called Kyrmiah.

Assistant Professor Evren Alici of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden who is a world expert in natural killer (NK) cells is also on this board as is Professor Karl Peggs of University College Hospital London.

Why are they advising a still relatively small company? “I genuinely believe what’s attracted them to sit on our Science Advisory Board is the eloquence of the technology,” Martin said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about putting a quality cell back inside the patient. The people on our Scientific Advisory Board are practitioners so they understand the importance of what we are trying to do.”

Drug delivery ‘3.0’ 

There is an Elan thread through both the investor and board group in Avectas. “Elan was such an opportunity for us to grow and learn, and be part of the world stage from Ireland,” Martin reflected. “I absolutely love being involved with Avectas. I love the passion and the excitement and the energy of the team, but also the opportunity to really do something significant.

“The enthusiasm of everybody in Avectas is palpable, and it’s the same as in the early days of Elan. We’re also in a new field – cell therapy is really just beginning – and so there’s nobody who is the dominant expert. Everybody is learning and evolving at the same time, and that was the same in Elan. Elan was genuinely number one or number two globally in drug delivery when it was a new industry in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.”  

Martin added: “It’s very analogous to the early business model of Elan. We’re developing a really advanced drug delivery technology, and we will commercialise it through partnerships.” 

Maguire said the thing that excites him most was how Avectas was working in an field where so many different areas of science from biomedical engineering to biology and immunology all converged: “It’s like that old phrase, it takes a village to raise a child, you know it really takes a village to develop a therapy for a patient.”

“Imagine if you really, really, really genuinely could cure certain types of cancer?” Photo: Bryan Meade

I ask Martin where she would like Avectas to go. “I’d like the company to be a very successful Irish company with our technology placed in the leading therapeutic companies in the world in cell therapy. I’d like our technology to have been involved in the development and manufacture of commercialised products that really make a meaningful difference in patients’ lives. I would like our tech sitting inside, or used for the development and manufacture of therapies that cure cancer.”

According to Maguire: “We have all the ingredients around the Avectas table and in our ecosystem. Everything is there to make a success of this.”  

“To me, this is drug delivery 3.0,” Martin said. “If the first era of drug delivery was delivering small molecules and chemicals, and the second was biologics and proteins and peptides, then this is really the third wave of drug delivery and the third wave of medicine.”

“I joined Elan 32 years ago. It was my first entry into the world of drug delivery and I am as excited now as ever I was. The challenges just keep getting more complex, but the therapeutic opportunities just keep getting more exciting.”  

“Imagine if you really, really, really genuinely could cure certain types of cancer? That is the area that we are operating in. I’m as excited and passionate as ever. Why shouldn’t an Irish company do it?”