National Resilience, a San Diego-based provider of biopharma manufacturing services, said today it has completed a $625 million Series D financing whose proceeds will be used to expand its network of technologies, facilities, academic collaborations, business launches, and incubations.
Resilience added that it also plans to use proceeds of the financing toward organic growth, international expansion initiatives, and advanced research and development efforts that include stable cell lines for viral vector production, distributed manufacturing for autologous cell therapy and cell-free and continuous manufacturing for biologics.
“These new funds will help support our next phase of growth, as we continue to innovate biomanufacturing across all our modalities, expand our footprint to serve customers, sign strategic collaborations and support the developers of a new generation of complex medicines,” Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi, ScD, said in a statement.
“We have an ambitious goal to reinvent biomanufacturing by bringing new processes and technologies to an industry that hasn’t kept pace with the explosive innovation in drug discovery,” Singhvi added. “While we recognize that our goal is neither quick nor easy, we are driven by our mission to democratize access to medicines.”
Resilience focuses its manufacturing on five therapeutic modalities: Biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids and cell and gene therapies. The company has 10 facilities across North America, with more than one million square feet of manufacturing space and more than 1,600 employees.
The company’s network of facilities is expected to add capacity and capabilities this year, with projects underway at several existing sites. Resilience says its capabilities can enable customers to scale their biomanufacturing projects from process and analytical development through preclinical to large scale commercial drug substance and drug product manufacturing.
Resilience also pursues partnerships with large and small biopharmas through fee-for-service arrangements, value-share agreements and new company creation/incubation projects.
On Thursday, Resilience and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center launched a joint venture, the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, designed to accelerate the development and manufacturing of cell therapies for patients with cancer.
Last month, Resilience and Be Biopharma formed a strategic collaboration of undisclosed value to manufacture engineered B Cells to create a new class of autologous and allogeneic cellular medicines.
Up-to-$250M defense contract
Earlier this year, Resilience signed a strategic manufacturing services agreement with Opus Genetics, a developer of gene therapies for inherited retinal diseases; established a multi-product development and manufacturing collaboration with Takeda’s Plasma-Derived Therapies Business Unit; and secured an up-to-$250 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense toward manufacturing a monoclonal antibody as a medical countermeasure to botulinum neurotoxins.
In December 2021, Resilience acquired for an undisclosed price SwiftScale Biologics, a San Leandro, CA, developer of cell-free protein synthesis, a technology that aims to eliminate the constraints of using living cells in the drug manufacturing process. Resilience says the technology results in faster production times, less variability across batches and greater scalability with hard-to-produce proteins.
And in October 2021, Resilience formed a strategic collaboration with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to implement next-generation biomanufacturing technologies and capabilities toward creation of therapies and technologies; and launched a five-year R&D alliance with Harvard University to incubate new technologies and launch companies to advance the manufacture of complex medicines.
On the manufacturing side, Resilience has grown its infrastructure by:
- Planning to bring online this year drug substance and drug product manufacturing expansions to support biologics and vaccines in Alachua, FL, Boston, and Toronto.
- Constructing a new facility in Marlborough, MA to support vaccines and gene therapy, set to come online in 2023.
- Adding a new cell and gene therapy process and analytical development, and a drug substance manufacturing site in the Philadelphia region.
- Acquiring bluebird bio’s125,000-square-foot Research Triangle Park, NC, manufacturing facility last year for $110 million.
Resilience did not disclose any of its investors for the $625 million Series D, except to describe them as “new and existing investors that included venture capital funds, public mutual funds, pension funds, biopharma companies, sovereign wealth funds and private family offices, among others.”
The latest financing brings to more than $2 billion Resilience’s total equity financing raised since it emerged from stealth mode in 2000 with more than $800 million in capital, most of it from a $750 million Series B financing.
Resilience’s total capital includes a $600 million Series C financing that the company completed in August 2021, but which it had not announced until today.