Resilience opens doors to showcase former Sanofi plant to BWB delegates

Resilience Boston lies nestled against the Charles River across the street from the rolling red-brick buildings that make up the famous Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Rahul Singhvi, CEO and cofounder of Resilience, stood at the head of the room, flanked by shrimp cocktails, fruit kebobs, and the kind of chocolate-covered strawberries that shatter into sweet little carpet stains when you bite into them. Behind him, the river flowed through green vegetation and underneath the arches of the Western Avenue bridge. Occasionally, the already idyllic view was punctuated by boats, presumably crewed by members of the Harvard rowing team.

Singhvi spoke about the history of the company and the acquisition of the Boston, Massachusetts site from Sanofi in 2021. “What we have done since taking [the facility] over from Sanofi, is we’ve built a modern plant that is state of the art,” he said. To a room of university lab technicians, consultants, prospective clients, and other interested parties, he touted the company’s manufacturing capabilities.

Resilience Boston is a 335,000 square-foot multi-modality process and analytical development (PAD) and manufacturing facility with over 76,000 square feet of production space. The facility can perform drug-substance manufacturing, non-GMP and GMP stability testing, and PAD with monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), viral vectors, and mRNA.

At the time of the company’s founding in 2020, founder and chairman of the company’s board of directors Robert Nelson said “COVID-19 has exposed critical vulnerabilities in medical supply chains, and today’s manufacturing can’t keep up with scientific innovation, medical discovery, and the need to rapidly produce and distribute critically important drugs at scale.”

Evan Pasenello, head of commercial services at the facility led the tour group through winding white halls past signs and into laboratories after each visitor was fitted with white lab coats and safety goggles. Inside, scientists from the company discussed and demonstrated how they use their equipment for many of their processes, including analytics and upstream process development.

An upstream scientist named Ethan described how the company’s Ambr 250 bioreactor system (Sartorius) worked. “A lot of process control is automated with the Ambr,” he said. That said, he failed to discuss the utility of the Pokémon sticker displayed proudly on the front of the machine. (For those who are dying to know, it was Porygon.)

In the benchtop bioreactor area, another upstream scientist named Andy displayed the company’s eight Biostat B systems from Sartorius and then showed off a long-duration perfusion process that was on day 34 using an alternating tangential flow filtration (ATF) system from Repligen. “We are also equipped with low shear centrifugal pumps, so we can run [tangential flow filtration] TFF processes.”

Before heading to the last leg of the tour the tour, attendants stopped to look at Resilience’s four 2,000 L stainless steel bioreactors, which Singhvi affectionally referred to as the “museum” because the equipment is not in active use. Nevertheless, the bioreactors are functional, and the company has a plan to bring them online should they be needed again in the future. But it would take a large request to make such a project worthwhile.

“It would be a very specific need to bring this back online,” Pasenello said of the museum.

The tour concluded at Resilience’s active bioreactor suite. Typically, cell lines begin in the 200 L reactor before moving to the 2,000 L reactor, assuming they can handle the 10-fold scale up. In cases where they can’t, a 500 L bioreactor is available as an intermediate option.

“You’ve gotta look inside this thing,” said Joseph Shultz, vice president and head of technical development at Resilience as he opened the door for the 2,000 L bioreactor. The reactor did its best Tardis impression by appearing even bigger on the inside. In size, it was only two margaritas short of a hot tub.

“It’s redonculous,” Shultz said.