2025 Sohn Montreal: Opportunities in Life Sciences

At the 2025 Sohn Montreal Conference, Clarissa Desjardins, Founder & CEO of Congruence Therapeutics, and Lloyd M. Segal, former President & CEO of Repare Therapeutics, joined moderator André Perold, Partner and CIO of HighVista Strategies, for the “Investing in Our Future: Opportunities in Life Sciences” panel. The conversation explored the biotech sector’s unique mix of mission-driven innovation, persistent inefficiencies, and long-term investment potential. Drawing on their deep entrepreneurial and leadership experience, Desjardins and Segal offered a candid look at what it takes to build breakthrough science into lasting companies, while Perold framed the moment as a rare buying opportunity in one of the market’s most compelling corners.

Clarissa Desjardins

• Background: Clarissa Desjardins is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four biotech companies in Montreal. Her first company was started during her PhD at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The second was Caprion Radiomics, now a global CRO. The third was Clementia Pharmaceuticals, which developed a drug for a rare pediatric disease and was acquired in 2019. She is currently building her fourth company, Congruence Therapeutics. She has always been fascinated by science. Entrepreneurship stemmed from a patentable discovery. She learned business from Lloyd Segal and emphasizes being patient-centric.
• Firm Focus: Congruence Therapeutics is a startup focused on biotech.
• Time at Firm: Clarissa Desjardins founded Congruence Therapeutics in 2021.

Lloyd Segal

• Background: He describes himself as a "recovering McKinsey consultant". Lloyd Segal has worked in biotech and healthcare private equity for the past 25 years. He helped build Repare Therapeutics from a small private company to a public company with clinical candidates. He served on the board of Valeant Pharmaceuticals for seven and a half years and helped move it to Montreal. He partnered with Clarissa Desjardins partly due to the lack of financial discipline in some small biotech startups. He learned science from Clarissa Desjardins.
• Firm Focus: Repare Therapeutics is a clinical-stage precision oncology company developing targeted cancer therapies using synthetic lethality.
• Time at Firm: He helped build Repare Therapeutics and was President & CEO, overseeing their NASDAQ listing in 2020. He served from June 2016 to April 2025, a tenure of nearly nine years, before recently retiring from the CEO role.

Andre Perold

• Background: He was previously the George Gund Professor at Harvard Business School, where he held senior roles and won awards for his work in investment management and capital markets. He sits on the boards of Vanguard and RIT Capital Partners and has served on several nonprofit investment committees, including Mass General Brigham.
• Firm Focus: HighVista Strategies focuses on specialty alternatives, with significant investment in biotech equities.
• Time at Firm: He co-founded HighVista Strategies in 2004.

2025 Sohn Montreal Conference - Clarissa Desjardins, Lloyd Segal and Andre Perold

Andre Perold: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here with this incredible audience on this occasion. Thanks, Aaron, for making this possible and inviting me and our two guests. Highvista is a specialty alternatives firm with $11 billion under management, including about $1 billion in biotech equities. We think of biotech as a beautifully inefficient market. An inefficient market is one where the price is wrong and can be exploited; a beautifully inefficient market is one that’s always that way and doesn’t get competed away. That’s what we’ll talk about today. With us are Lloyd Segal and Clarissa Desjardins, two experts. Please introduce yourselves briefly.

Clarissa Desjardins: I’m a serial entrepreneur. I founded four biotech companies in Montreal. The first was during my PhD at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where I recruited management, including Lloyd. The second, Caprion Radiomics, is now a global CRO with around 1,000 people, mostly in Montreal. The third, Clementia Pharmaceuticals, developed a drug for a rare pediatric disease and was acquired by Ipsen in 2019. That was the most rewarding experience I’ve had. Now I’m building my fourth company, Congruence Therapeutics, a three-year-old startup.

Lloyd Segal: As Clarissa mentioned, I’m a recovering McKinsey consultant. She recruited me out of there. For the last 25 years, I’ve worked in biotech and healthcare private equity. Inspired by what Clarissa accomplished at Clementia, approving a drug for a disease with fewer than a thousand patients, I helped build Repare Therapeutics from a small private company to a 180-person company with four clinical candidates. We listed on NASDAQ. I retired from Repare three weeks ago, but I’m still active there, though I don’t speak on their behalf today. One last note: I served on the board of Valeant Pharmaceuticals for seven and a half years. Some people made a lot of money, others not so much. But I’m proud of helping move Valeant from Toronto to Montreal, where it’s still headquartered.