Cullis has also co-founded eleven biotechnology companies that now employ over 400 people, has published over 400 scientific articles (h-index 138) and is an inventor on over 100 patents.
Two recently approved drugs that are enabled by LNP delivery systems devised by Cullis, members of his UBC laboratory, and colleagues in the companies he has co-founded deserve special emphasis.
The second is Comirnaty, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech that has received regulatory approval in many jurisdictions including Canada, the USA, the UK and Europe.
First is the drug Onpattro, a gene therapy that was approved (August 2018) by the FDA to treat hereditary amyloid transthyretin (hATTR) amyloidosis.
Onpattro is the first-in-class RNAi-based drug to be approved by the FDA and employs an LNP delivery system developed in collaboration with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (Boston), his laboratory at UBC and two spin-offs that he co-founded (Protiva/Arbutus and Acuitas Therapeutics).
A remarkable feature of Onpattro is that it is able to not only stop further progression of this hitherto untreatable disease (which usually leads to death within five years of diagnosis), but also to reverse the neuropathies and cardiovascular issues associated with hATTR.