Dr. Maurice M. Moloney

To call Dr. Maurice Moloney a gypsy would be a bit of a stretch. After all, he’s been in Calgary for 20 years. Then again, the native of Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland, grew up in Liverpool, attending the Jesuit-run Preston Catholic College before moving to London to study biochemistry under three Nobel Laureates at Imperial College. Then he was off to Leicester for a PhD in Plant Biochemistry before heading to the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) for his post-doctoral fellowship. He’d have stayed there as an academic, too, except…well…he didn’t. Instead, while in California visiting a friend who worked for Calgene, he was asked to give a talk about his post-doc research and the CEO offered him a job on the spot. Intrigued, he accepted and over the next five years he was instrumental in developing the first transgenic canola, which now represents 85% of the grain’s worldwide crop.

In 1987, Maurice, by now interested in conducting research and commercialising his own work, came to Alberta to join the University of Calgary’s Department of Biological Sciences.  Two years later, with the help of grant money from the Alberta Agriculture Research Institute and NSERC, he began work that would lead to the patents which allowed him to approach the U of C technology transfer office about spinning off his own company. SemBioSys was founded in 1994 and actually was a beneficiary of the tight fiscal climate under which universities were operating in the mid-90s. His department had been significantly reduced, allowing SemBioSys to use university lab space and human resource and administrative support. In fact, during the first four years all the company’s fundamental technological development took place at U of C and by 1998 the fledgling firm was ready to build a pilot plant. With the addition of long-time Calgene friend, Andrew Baum, as President and CEO, SemBioSys raised significant venture capital money—a total of $62M over the years—and began evolving into the internationally competitive entity it is today.

Dr. Moloney, as founder and chief scientific officer, is justifiably proud of the SemBioSys brand. The company’s proprietary—and quite extraordinary—transgenic and non-transgenic technologies are leading to the development of a range of biotherapeutic products, notably cost-effective insulin derived from safflower seeds. The SemBioSys insulin can be produced in a facility whose capital costs are 70% lower than those of a conventional insulin manufacturer. To assess the impact of such a breakthrough, one need only consider the following information on diabetes provided by the World Health Organisation:

•  Diabetes causes about 5% of all deaths globally each year.
• 80% of people with diabetes live in low- and middle-income countries.
• In 2000, 171 million people worldwide had diabetes; that number is expected to top 366 million by 2030.
• Diabetes deaths are likely to increase by more than 50% in the next 10 years without urgent action.