AavantiBio has hired Resilience to make its gene therapies candidates, including a therapy for the currently untreatable progressive disorder Friedreich’s Ataxia (FA).

Under the contract – described as a strategic collaboration – Resilience will provide process development and manufacturing as well as including cell lines and viral banks for in pre-clinical studies and clinical trials.

The contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) will also develop and optimize processes for AvantBio’s other candidate therapies, with all of the work scheduled to take place at the facility in Alachua, Florida that it acquired with Ology Bioservices in April.

Image: iStock/Shidlovski

AvantiBio CEO Bo Cumbo indicated the collaboration with Resilience would be long lasting.

“This partnership supports our immediate and long-term objectives in developing and ultimately commercializing our diverse pipeline of gene therapies.”

He added, “With an emphasis on Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) for gene therapies, we are committed to ensuring the quality of manufacturing processes along with analytical development.

“We look forward to a lasting collaboration with Resilience as we execute on our mission of bringing new therapies to patient populations.”

Technology strategy

Resilience – officially known as National Resilience – was set up in November with the aim of building the “world’s most advanced biopharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem.”

The CDMO raised more than $800m from backers including ARCH Venture Partners and 8VC, with GV and NEA as well as some US drug makers and financial foundations.

At the time it said it planned to invest in technologies for the production of medicines, citing cell and gene therapies, viral vectors, vaccines and protein-based drugs as examples.

This strategy was underlined by Resilience CEO Rahul Singhvi in May who suggested the CDMO sector needs to keep up with innovation in the drug discovery and development lab.

“All of these type of medicines require very different type of experience expertise and capabilities for producing the product and what we had learned over the past several decades was probably not enough.”

He added that his CDMO’s approach is to invest in capacity, innovation and a team with the know-how needed to make new products.

“So the main purpose of forming this company was to really, for the first time, make strategic investments in manufacturing science and technology, which would enable the processes to produce these complex medicines bring and bring them up to standard to the rate at which biology was creating these new type of modalities.”

Along with the Ology buy, Resilience bought a plant in Boston, Massachusetts from Sanofi-Genzyme in February, acquired a facility in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada from Therapure Biopharma, and is subleasing a 153,000 square-foot facility from Orchard Therapeutics.