AbCellera Biologics Inc. Carl L.G. Hansen, Ph.D.

Co-founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, AbCellera Biologics Inc. (ABCL)

Why it matters

The CEO view

Ran the UBC lab the company was spun out of and has led it since its inception in November 2012; beneficially owns 65.2 million shares, 20.9% of the company, mostly through Thermopylae Holdings.
On the record with shareholders

Earnings calls

  1. Q2 2026 Aug 5, 2026 Carl Hansen used the call to argue that AbCellera has already stopped being a partnership business and is now a drug developer waiting on one number. He put the ABCL635 Phase 2 top-line readout — enrolled and dosed in June, ahead of schedule — at the centre of the year, stated in advance what he would count as success (a clean safety profile and roughly a 20% frequency response over placebo), and named the one thing that could still go wrong: whether blocking NK3R in the preoptic nucleus matters, which he said has never been proved pre-clinically and which the Phase 2 exists to answer. He also volunteered a missed timeline, on moving another program into IND-enabling work in the first half. Against that risk he set the T-cell engager platform, five years in the making, which had just produced Jazz and Vertex deals adding over $110 million of upfront cash and up to $4 billion of potential value — the argument being that the platform now funds the pipeline rather than competing with it. Read the call · 9 quotes →
In their own words

Podcasts, interviews & articles

3 recorded appearances

2026

Investment Reports
Interview Investment Reports · Jun 11, 2026

Carl Hansen, AbCellera

Hansen explains why the company avoided venture capital until 2018 — a platform company on VC time gets pushed to an exit before it has built anything — and funded itself instead on partnership discovery revenue. Puts headcount at around 600 and frames the fully integrated biopharma ambition as a decades-long compounding exercise rather than a near-term goal.

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Investment Reports
Interview Investment Reports · Feb 27, 2026

Carl Hansen, AbCellera

States plainly that the partnership business was deliberately ramped down starting in 2023 to fund an owned pipeline, and sets the pre-readout expectations: a Phase 2 result for ABCL635 in Q3 2026 against a $6B+ addressable market, five clinical-stage programs by mid-2027, and roughly $700M of total liquidity to reach those inflections.

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2025