National Resilience to lay off 120 employees at North Carolina gene therapy site
The layoffs continue at CDMO National Resilience — also known as Resilience. In a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice, filed Jan. 6 with the North Carolina Department of Commerce, the company said it was permanently laying off 120 employees at its Durham, N.C. gene therapy facility.
The Durham site was acquired by Resilience for $110 million in 2021 from gene therapy company bluebird bio to support lentiviral vector production. Impacted employees were notified this week with terminations beginning effective March 7, 2025, according to the WARN notice, which said about 54 employees “will remain employed after the initial termination date, i.e., until approximately December 15, 2025 to continue to assist with certain tasks.”
Last month, Resilience announced it was laying off 105 employees at its biomanufacturing site in Alachua, Florida, which it acquired from Ology Bioservices for an undisclosed amount in 2021.
Resilience is a newcomer to the CDMO space. Launched in 2020 with $800 million in funds from venture capital firms, the company promised to provide “new, better, faster ways” to manufacture cell and gene therapies and soon after acquiring several companies.
“Over the past four years, Resilience has scaled quickly, through acquisitions and organic growth, into a robust multi-modality manufacturing network across North America,” Catherine Hanley, vice president and head marketing and corporate communications, said in an emailed statement to Pharma Manufacturing.
The CDMO has made the decision to “right size” the Durham facility “based on demand in the gene therapy sector, which requires reducing headcount in parts of our network while simultaneously growing it in other parts,” Hanley said. “We will continue to operate and focus on commercial development and manufacturing to meet customers’ demands and patients’ needs.”
CEO William Marth, who took the helm of Resilience last month and served previously as president and COO, said in a statement at the time that the company “will continue to innovate as a science-driven CDMO, leveraging existing technologies.”
In February 2024, Resilience planned to invest $225 million in its Cincinnati facility to increase drug product capacity. At the site, a fourth pre-filled syringes (PFS) fill line is slated for 2025 as well as an expansion of assembly and packaging suites, according to the announcement at the time.