New modalities drive revenue for Repligen despite 'lumpy’ CDMO demand

For Q1, the bioprocess vendor reported total revenues of $151 million in comparison with $183 million. This decline was driven by a deficit of $23 million in COVID-related revenue and a slump in orders in its chromatography proteins, which the firm said had been anticipated. 

During its financial call, Repligen’s CEO Anthony Hunt reassured investors of a “strong growth for 2025” as the firm banks on continued demand from new modalities.

“Both sales and orders from new modality accounts were another area of strength at levels higher both sequentially and year-on-year. New modality revenue growth in the first quarter of 2024 was greater than 15% compared to the first quarter of 2023, and orders were up 8%.” 

In fact, the firm witnessed a 16% rise in new modalities year-on-year, with orders going up in high-single-digits for the first quarter. “As noted on our February call, strength in new modalities is directly tied to our top 20 to 25 accounts who are scaling with our technology,” said Hunt. 

Furthermore, the CEO highlighted Repligen’s performance in filtration and fluid management, which went up by 10%.

“Our filtration franchise had a very strong. As mentioned earlier, this was driven by the success of alternating tangential flow filtration (ATF), where we have been specified into nine late stage and commercial processes since mid-2023. The impact of these late-stage wins drive more consistency in consumables and should be a key driver of growth for this business over the coming years, especially as many of these drugs are in the ramp up phase.” 

CDMO stickiness and BIOSECURE 

Hunt also cited “stickiness” and “lumpiness” in the demand of products and services from contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs),  

“CDMO orders were down year-on-year and sequentially. Some of the softness can be attributed to lumpiness in orders from a few of our larger accounts, but it's fair to say that, at this point, we're not seeing a true sticky rebound from CDMOs,” noted Hunt. 

Waiting for recovery in the CDMO business, Olivier Loeillot, the recently installed COO, said, “We started to see some improvements [with the CDMO business]. There are also quite a lot of moving pieces right now, or potential moving pieces, with the recent acquisition of Catalent by Novo, and the potential implementation of the BIOSECURE Act, which means that probably some of the projects are moving from one CDMO to the other, and so on.” 

Regarding BIOSECURE, Repligen has adhered to a “wait and see” policy, the CEO said. “We've had lots of questions on [the BIOSECURE Act], as you can imagine, over the last couple of months. I think it's a wait and see, but if it were to pass and there were changes, then, yeah, there would be some tech transfer lag that would probably happen. But let's see how this all plays out.”