Every month, MassBio spotlights a member company and the great work they’re doing to advance the life sciences industry and support the patients we serve. In January, we spoke with Rahul Singhvi, CEO of National Resilience, Inc. Before joining Resilience, Rahul was an Operating Partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he was responsible for founding and operating companies launched from Flagship’s innovation foundry. Before joining Flagship, Rahul was the Chief Operating Officer of Takeda’s Vaccine Business Unit where he was responsible for worldwide vaccine CMC and manufacturing operations. You can also explore a future with Resilience with their career opportunities.
Tell us about your organization, its mission, and current initiatives.
Resilience is a technology-focused manufacturing company aimed at revolutionizing how complex medicines are made. It was founded during the pandemic due to frustration with the industry’s inability to quickly and efficiently manufacture the materials and medicines needed to fight the COVID-19 outbreak. To create a resilient supply chain for pandemic preparedness, the founder Bob Nelsen recruited top executives to join him, and raised significant funding to build an organization aimed at changing the industry and revolutionizing the way medicines are made. From that beginning, Resilience rapidly grew to 10 manufacturing sites across North America with 1 million square feet of space and 1,500 employees. Today, Resilience is focused on five technology areas: biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids and cell and gene therapies.
How do your organization’s activities help patients now and into the future?
We believe that by bringing biomanufacturing technology into the twenty first century, we will enable more new medicines to reach patients in need. That’s why we partner with companies of all sizes, from nascent biotech startups to the largest global pharma companies, and create custom collaborations best suited to their needs, from simple fee-for service offerings to risk-share and value-share arrangements. We are also building and acquiring potentially game-changing manufacturing technologies to enable efficient manufacturing of life saving, curative therapies. We know that truly changing the industry will take time and innovation, so we are investing in early-stage research with experts in organizations such as Harvard University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), to develop new groundbreaking therapies that are intended to help people with no treatment options. Finally, thanks to our rapid build out last year, we have the capacity to take on exciting existing commercial projects, such as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, to help save lives around the world.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the life sciences industry today?
There is currently a large gap between the incredible science driving the surge of new, complex medicines and the technology the industry uses to produce them. Common manufacturing solutions used widely in other industries – standardization, automation, robotics, real-time data analysis – aren’t available or are under-utilized in the biomanufacturing production processes. This leads to each drug maker having to pave their own path with manufacturing, resulting in a cottage industry of solutions. Resilience is building and acquiring the latest technology, equipment, and processes to develop the next generation manufacturing solutions, raise performance and modernize biomanufacturing.
What’s next for your organization / what are you focused on in the coming year?
Resilience is just getting started. We will continue to invest in new technologies, new sites and new customers to improve how medicines are made. We are also working to digitize our network, using cloud solutions and other advancements to further modernize biomanufacturing and provide customers with better and faster solutions.
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