Gene therapy drug developer lays off 120 at Durham facility near Research Triangle Park
A contract drug manufacturer informed North Carolina officials Monday it would layoff around 120 workers at its Durham office near Research Triangle Park.
In a WARN Notice to the N.C. Department of Commerce, the San Diego-based firm National Resilience said all impacted employes would be notified this week, with terminations beginning in March. The company intends to retain roughly 50 of these laid off Triangle employees through December “to continue to assist with certain tasks,” Resilience’s chief people officer Mara Strandlund wrote.
Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams was included in the company’s mass layoff notification.
Companies must file WARN reports to the North Carolina Department of Commerce at least 60 days prior to certain job cuts. The state then deploys a rapid response team to help workers transition to new opportunities.
Resilience is a fairly new company, founded during the pandemic in late 2020 to increase supply of novel treatments. The next year, it acquired the Research Triangle facility of the gene therapy company bluebird bio. Resilience would use the site to make viral vectors, a key part of gene therapies.
The company said it was not closing its entire Durham office, which is on TW Alexander Drive. A contract development and manufacturing organization, or CDMO, Resilience employed between 100 and 200 workers statewide according to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center. It did not list how many employees would remain at its site, nor did Resilience give a reason for laying off workers in its WARN letter.
A company spokesperson did not immediately respond to The News & Observer’s questions regarding what factors motivated the job cuts.
After experiencing a boom during the pandemic, gene and cell therapy developers have seen a sharp decline in funding as investors favor life science projects with less risk and a clearer journey to profitability. Gene therapy is an emerging technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat diseases.
In February, Resilience announced a redesign of its Research Triangle facility to accommodate different types of medicines. At the time, the company said it had 45,000 square feet of available space for drug production.
Outside of the Triangle, Resilience has cut jobs at other facilities it recently acquired. Last month, the CDMO announced it would lay off 105 workers at a facility in Florida, and in early 2023, the company laid off more than 200 workers at a site in Boston. As with its Durham office, Resilience purchased these facilities from other companies in 2021.
As it scales back elsewhere, the company appears to be growing in Ohio, where last year it committed $225 million to expand its Cincinnati facility.
