Dive Brief:
- National Resilience, a startup that launched in 2020 to help young biotechnology companies produce complex medicines, said Monday it plans to wind down six facilities in California, Massachusetts and Florida.
- In a letter to customers Monday, Resilience CEO William Marth said the company’s “capacity expansion has outpaced industry demand.” Resilience will streamline operations in response, focusing resources on a main hub in Cincinnati as well as its Toronto operations. Both will work in “high-growth segments” such as cell-based medicines, biologics and aseptic drug products, Marth wrote.
- Resilience, which had already raised more than $2 billion in venture dollars since its inception, has added another $250 million in bridge financing to support the effort. The company will also pursue debt funding “to fuel longer-term growth plans,” Marth wrote.
Dive Insight:
Resilience emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceived by Arch Venture Partners co-founder and managing director Robert Nelsen, the startup debuted with $800 million in financing and ambitious plans to substantially boost the production capacity for innovative medicines like vaccines, genetic medicines and protein-based drugs.
The company spent the next few years building up a manufacturing network and cutting deals with pharmaceutical partners. It acquired a Bluebird bio plant in North Carolina and a large Sanofi facility in Boston. Resilience also formed a vaccine-focused pact with Moderna and added alliances with companies like AstraZeneca, Cargo Therapeutics and BridgeBio Pharma.
The biotech startup was initially flush with cash, too, announcing more than $1.2 billion in venture financing in 2021 and 2022 as well as subsequent deals with federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense.
But that fast growth has come during a prolonged, sector-wide pullback that has hit gene and cell therapy developers particularly hard. The company has been rebalancing its operations over the last couple years and laid off staff multiple times. In 2023, it let go of more than 200 employees in the Boston area and over 100 at a facility in Florida. That year, Resilience also sold a few facilities to a real estate group and leased them back to raise cash. Resilience cut 120 staff at Bluebird’s former North Carolina plant at the start of 2025, too.
In the streamlining announced Monday, Resilience is shedding three Massachusetts facilities in Bedford, Allston and Marlborough; two California plants in San Diego and Fremont; and one in Alachua, Florida. A Resilience affiliate holding leases to those sites is “commencing legal proceedings to do that promptly and efficiently,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to BioPharma Dive.
