Resilience makes good on ex-AZ plant expansion

National Resilience has pledged to add jobs at the Ohio fill/finish plant recently acquired from AstraZeneca.

According to the firm, 440 jobs are being created at the 580,000 square-foot facility in West Chester, Ohio across functions including manufacturing engineering, quality control, IT, and management. Of that, 274 will be direct employees and 166 will be contracted employees.

“After completing our purchase of the West Chester manufacturing site in January 2023, Resilience remains committed to the state of Ohio and we are thrilled to both further develop and modernize the facility and grow our West Chester workforce,” said Rahul Singhvi, CEO of Resilience.

The commitment comes a year after the deal with AstraZeneca was first announced. Resilience took on 500+ staff members and said it was looking to grow the site to bring aseptic filling, inspection, packaging, labelling, and cold-chain operations into its network.

“Our West Chester facility plays a key role within Resilience’s network, as the site serves as our global center of excellence for commercial drug product manufacturing.”

The West Chester site was added to AstraZeneca’s production network in 2013 through the $2.7 billion acquisition of Bristol Myer Squibb’s diabetes business. Bristol Myers had added the plant the year prior through its $5.3 billion acquisition of Amylin Pharmaceuticals.

For Resilience, a biopharma services firm – effectively a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) – focused on a range of modalities that has been active in M&A since its launch in 2019, the pledge comes at the end of another busy year.

In February, the firm sold then leased back its flagship facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts from Oxford Properties Group in order to raise money. The same month, the firm reduced operations at a former Sanofi plant in Massachusetts picked up in February 2021, following the ending of its contract to manufacture enzyme replacement therapy, Cerezyme (imiglucerase).

The firm has also been vocal on several contracts inked this year, including a $410 million US government deal, a risk-sharing gene therapy partnership with BridgeBio, and a joint venture with Saudi Arabian drug company Lifera to build a drug product manufacturing facility in Riyadh.