Resilience, Harvard University Ink 5-Year Strategic R&D Alliance Leveraging Biomedical Innovation for a Resilient Tomorrow

San Diego-based National Resilience, Inc., one of Robert Nelsen’s biopharmaceutical manufacturing startups, announced a strategic five-year R&D coalition with the prestigious Harvard University.

Under a five-year pact with Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, Resilience has pledged a $30 million dollar to the partnership directed toward the development of complex medicines, including biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids, and cell and gene therapies to improve patients’ lives.

Founded in 2020, Resilience offers customized and scalable manufacturing bioprocesses, the highest quality and regulatory capabilities, and world-class talent and facilities for complex and novel medicines.

Thus, in its pursuit of building a resilient today and tomorrow– by supporting the drug development process – from the preclinical stage to commercial supply, Resilience will fund faculty-initiated biomedical research at Harvard, primarily focused on the discoveries of novel therapeutic and cutting-edge biomanufacturing technologies pioneered in the university’s labs.

The alliance also expects that new innovations and novel biomedical technologies that would spin out viable from the university labs will be pursued by Resilience toward further clinical development, validation, licensing, and commercialization to improve patients’ clinical outcomes.

Promising Technology for Skeletal Muscle Disorders

Of note, Resilience has already identified a promising technology for skeletal muscle disorders in a Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology lab, led by Prof. Lee Rubin, Ph.D. The researchers have successfully generated millions of cells in the lab that typically behave like skeletal muscle stem cells (satellite cells). These stem cells exhibit tremendous regenerative potential for use in possible cell therapies.

It has now created an entity, Circle Therapeutics, aiming to validate the technology further and carry it forward toward license and commercialization for skeletal muscle disorders.

“Now, with Resilience’s focused funding and experience in the development of complex medicine, we hope to set it on a clear path toward benefiting patients,” said Vivian Berlin, Ph.D., Executive Director, HMS, at Harvard OTD, who leads OTD’s Corporate Alliances team.

Although with prior support from the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, investigators have clearly demonstrated the translational impact of this work; however, under this strategic alliance, Rubin lab’s platform could fast-track to expand and maintain satellite cells to deliver transformative cell therapies to patients.

On the road ahead, Resilience and Harvard will jointly seek proposals from investigators to identify additional potential research projects that could be developed at Harvard under the partnership. As part of the agreement, Resilience may even opt to license and commercialize the Harvard technology that would result from the funded projects.

Besides this coalition, in pursuit of being the next generation of life science/ biopharmaceutical manufacturing and development, Resilience has collaborated in the past with other companies like Moderna to make mRNA for the drug maker’s COVID-19 vaccine; joins forces with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Bluebird Bio to develop next-generation biomanufacturing technologies for therapeutics and cell therapies, respectively.

Nevertheless, such strategic collaborations provide yet another valuable source of fast-track support and industry expertise to translational biomedical researchers worldwide as they seek to improve patients’ lives.

Author

Isha Kapoor