Scientist-Entrepreneur Creates Drug Molecules That Can Change Lives

Robert Foster, ’79 BSc, ’82 BSc(Pharm), ’85 PharmD, ’88 PhD, was thinking of a music career when fate, in the form of gentle dissuasion from his trumpet teacher, intervened. He drifted into the science faculty, played pool at SUB, suffered through English classes and stumbled into organic chemistry. 

“And I just clicked,” Foster recalls. “I could visualize what needed to be done to understand molecules.”

Fate had struck.

More than 40 years after getting his first degree of four, Foster has matched that understanding of molecules with business acumen (he has been the founder and/or CEO of four companies), a willingness to take risks (he left a tenured U of A position to start his first company in 1993) and sheer tenacity. “It’s almost like the pit bull mentality,” he says. “I was, in a way, that pit bull.”

Foster is among the few Canadian drug inventors to get approval for a drug from the United States Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. Since 2021, voclosporin has provided relief to hundreds of thousands of people with lupus nephritis, a severe autoimmune condition. 

Earlier this year, Foster got another FDA boost when rencofilstat, a drug developed by his company Hepion Pharmaceuticals, was granted orphan drug status for liver disease. (Orphan drug status covers drugs for rare diseases that might not be profitable to produce without government assistance.) Rencofilstat has also received an FDA fast track designation for use in another liver disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, also referred to as NASH, which can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer. About a quarter of the population is believed to have non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, of which about 20 per cent will develop NASH. 

Little wonder that Foster is excited. “If we can put a little dent on the clinical course of having NASH … we can save lives,” he says. “It’s a big task for a small little company.”

Fortunately for that small company, the boss has learned a thing or two since starting his career journey as a scientist, businessman and inventor. 

“When you’re in this type of business — or maybe any other business — in your mind you’ve got Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, and I’m not sure you’re limited to 26 letters of the alphabet,” he says. “You better have a lot of ideas because that’s what will hopefully enable you to be successful.”

You’d also be wise to surround yourself, as Foster has, with trusted colleagues who push and fight for the business’s success.

“It’s not a one-man show,” says the guy who literally used to blow his own horn.

“If you want to win that Stanley Cup — which is like getting a drug developed and approved by the FDA — you need to have a team.” 

Lorne Tyrrell, ’64 BSc, ’68 MD, director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, knows very well the dedication, persistence and teamwork it takes to develop a drug. It was Tyrrell’s research that led to the first oral treatment for chronic hepatitis B. 

“It takes unending passion and energy to build a company from scratch,” Tyrrell says. 

“Dr. Foster has done this over 28 years, and the culmination of his work is the FDA approval of the first oral treatment for systemic lupus nephritis.”