Echoing an earlier move in the United Arab Emirates, CDMO National Resilience is again growing its presence in the Middle East.
Resilience is teaming up with Lifera, a biopharma wholly owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to develop biomanufacturing capacity in the country’s capital of Riyadh.
Under the deal, Resilience will provide design expertise and help construct and commission a drug production plant in the city. The joint venture is specifically focused on sterile injectables and other parenteral products, which will help meet local therapeutic demands, the companies said in a press release.
The proposed facility will be on deck to handle aseptic filling of inactivated and bacterial vaccines plus mRNA shots and therapeutics such as monoclonal antibodies, plasma-derived products and large molecules.
Lifera will be in charge of the new facility, with Resilience owning a minority stake. The companies hope to add capacity to export to nearby countries, too.
Beyond the partners' initial goals, Lifera says its plans to explore additional technology transfer opportunities with Resilience that could allow the Saudi Arabian company to move into the fields of cell and gene therapies and nucleic acids.
Resilience will help train up to 200 Lifera staff for this project. As part of the deal, Resilience is in line to receive a “significant” equity investment from Lifera.
Resilience debuted in 2020 with more than $800 million in capital, laying plans to invest in new technologies to churn out cutting-edge therapeutics.
While the company initially emerged with a focus on the U.S. and Canada, the Saudi Arabia deal isn't Resilience’s first foray overseas.
In January, the company unveiled a plan to build a factory in the United Arab Emirates that will churn out vaccines and therapeutics for cancer, infectious diseases and other disorders.
Meanwhile, Resilience’s push marks the latest in a series of biopharma moves in Saudi Arabia.
In early July, for instance, Sanofi said it would link up with Saudi drugmakers Arabio and Lifera to bolster production of vaccines in the country. Under a recently minted memorandum of understanding, the companies plan to explore a range of potential prophylactic initiatives, including the enlistment of Lifera as a contract manufacturer to Sanofi, plus the build-out of a new manufacturing plant utilizing the latest vaccine tech.
Prior to that, Germany’s Merck KGaA in 2021 signed on with Saudi Arabia’s SaudiVax to construct a multimodality biologics production plant as part of the country’s effort to provide more localized production infrastructure for the Middle East and North Africa.