National Resilience Confirms Layoffs Amid Expansion and Leadership Change

Biomanufacturing CDMO, National Resilience, has announced plans to lay off approximately 105 employees at its Alachua, Florida facility as part of a strategic pivot away from government business toward commercial development and manufacturing. The restructuring coincides with a leadership change, as CEO Rahul Singhvi steps down and is replaced by William Marth. However, the company will continue to expand elsewhere, including a USD 225 mn investment in Cincinnati and creating 440 new jobs at its West Chester, Ohio facility.

The following article originally appeared in Fierce Pharma.

Despite expanding and adding hundreds of new jobs in states like Ohio in the past year, biomanufacturing CDMO National Resilience has elected to slim down at the Florida plant it acquired not long ago.

Resilience, which first emerged on the U.S. manufacturing scene in 2020, is laying off roughly 105 employees at its Alachua site, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (alert) recently filed with the state of Florida.

The company said it planned to inform employees of the cuts by Thursday. The layoff round is slated to kick off on February 3 and run through June 1, Resilience explained.

While some 105 staffers will ultimately be affected, Resilience added that it plans to retain around 27 of those workers “for a limited time after the initial termination date” to help “assist with certain tasks.”

"We have made the decision to downsize our government business to focus more strategically on commercial development and manufacturing to meet customers’ demands and patients’ needs," a Resilience spokesperson said of the layoff decision in an email to Fierce Pharma.

The spokesperson added that the CDMO will continue to honor commitments and close out contracted business with its Alachua customers.

Resilience noted in its WARN report that it doesn’t plan to close the Alachua site altogether.

The CDMO originally got its hands on the Alachua facility—and some 300 new employees—when it acquired biologic drug substance maker Ology Bioservices for an undisclosed sum back in April 2021.

At the time, Resilience said the former Ology workforce in Alachua would assist with regulatory services from the preclinical phase through licensure, plus clinical trial operations, bioanalytical testing and biologics manufacturing.

The new layoff reveal comes the same week that Resilience announced its CEO, Rahul Singhvi, has stepped down from his post. The company has appointed Teva and Curia Global veteran William Marth to take up the helm, effective immediately.

Since emerging in 2020, Resilience has been on a persistent expansion tear, though layoffs have occasionally factored into the equation, too.

In February, the CDMO said it would spend $225 million to bolster its facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. At the time, Resilience said it operated three high-speed vial fill lines at the Cincinnati site and planned to get a fourth prefilled syringe line up and running by 2025.

Meanwhile, in December of 2023, the company said it was expanding operations at a former AstraZeneca plant in West Chester, Ohio, and adding around 440 new jobs to boot.

Before that, in February of 2023, Resilience said it would cut roughly 213 jobs at a Boston, Massachusetts, site it acquired from Sanofi in 2021. When Resilience originally acquired the plant, the company extended job offers to some 250 former Sanofi staffers who worked there.

At the time, former CEO Singhvi said the reduction was a “function of transition” connected to the end of a manufacturing contract with Sanofi.

“We successfully completed the work that Sanofi gave us,” Singhvi said in an interview last year. “And simultaneously, after we purchased the facility, we started to build out a modern plant within the plant to ensure that we could attract new customers.”

For more, please find the original story source here.