When drug manufacturer National Resilience picked up a former Sanofi plant back in 2021, the company extended job offers to some 250 employees who had worked there. Now, after the end of a commercial manufacturing run and amid a downturn in demand, layoffs have entered the equation.
Still, the move shouldn’t be read as an omen of Resilience’s overall health as the company continues to grow elsewhere, its co-founder and CEO said in a recent interview.
Resilience’s job cuts will affect about 213 employees in Boston, a company spokesperson confirmed via email. Some 50 to 80 employees will stay onboard at the facility for a limited time.
The reduction is a “function of transition” tied to the end of a manufacturing contract with Sanofi, Resilience chief Rahul Singhvi told Fierce Pharma. When Resilience bought the plant in question from Sanofi in 2021, the manufacturer struck an accord to produce the French pharma’s Gaucher disease therapy Cerezyme, he explained. That contract ended as scheduled last year.
“We successfully completed the work that Sanofi gave us,” the CEO said. “And simultaneously, after we purchased the facility, we started to build out a modern plant within the plant to ensure that we could attract new customers.”
The former Genzyme facility was technologically dated when it changed hands, Singhvi noted. After making renovations, Resilience has garnered some interest from customers, “but not the kind of load that we would need to continue to carry the entire staff.”
Cerezyme, a drug that brought home 707 million euros (about $753 million) in 2022 sales, represented a “very high-volume product,” according to Singhvi. But now, the Boston facility “doesn’t have the kind of volumes that would require that many people.”
Resilience hopes the staff reduction will be temporary, with the goal to bring workers back on once volumes increase, the CEO said.
That said, the problem is confined to Boston, Singhvi stressed. He pointed to a similar plant purchase and manufacturing pact with AstraZeneca, in which Resilience snapped up a facility in Ohio and agreed to produce “select AstraZeneca medicines” long-term. In that instance, “volume came very fast.”
“We might actually have to add more people there in Westchester, Ohio,” Singhvi added.
Resilience owns and operates 7 drug manufacturing facilities in North America. It also controls half of a cell therapy manufacturing center through a joint venture with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Not including the joint venture, Resilience’s workforce numbers close to 2,200 full-time employees, Singhvi said.
Resilience debuted in late 2020 on a mission to build the “world’s most advanced biopharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem.” In terms of Resilience’s long-term goal, “there’s not a change in that vision,” the CEO said.
“We continue to strive to become the top athlete in biomanufacturing,” he said, noting he wants customers to see his company as trustworthy, competent and reliable.
Currently, Resilience boasts more than 50 customers. In its two-plus years since launching, the company has learned it needs to scale the business in tandem with its roster of R&D tech, Singhvi explained.
The company now has end-to-end capabilities—from drug substance to drug product—across a suite of drug modalities such as biologics, vaccines, viral vectors and nucleic acids. Commercial-stage cell therapy manufacturing is one area where the company could still grow capabilities, the CEO said.
All told, Resilience has been living up to its name in a tough financial environment, the CEO says. Even as the biotech market comes “under pressure,” Resilience hasn’t seen much reduction in customer volumes, at least in early- to midstage programs, Singhvi said.
He added that companies must “move away from the old ways” in which they develop manufacturing technology as well as the drugs themselves. Instead, Singhvi sees more drugmakers coming to rely on dedicated manufacturers like Resilience, which is out to prove its thesis that technology can enable U.S. companies to produce drugs locally and complete globally, irrespective of cheaper wages overseas.
“Technology could be the great equalizer for us, for our country to remain globally competitive and a leader, not only in the discovery and invention of new drugs, but also in the scale and industrialization of new drugs,” Singhvi said.