National Resilience is not running in circles these days. The manufacturing and tech shop appears to have its ducks in a row, and the latest high-profile move is a $30 million commitment to forming new companies with Harvard researchers.
First up is Circle Therapeutics. The biotech will bring forth a Harvard professor's technology platform with "promising applications in skeletal muscle disorders," the company said Friday.
Resilience might ring a bell: the San Diego-based company will help Moderna manufacture its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in Canada. It will also produce DNA products for newly launched gene therapy biotech Intergalactic Therapeutics and recently contributed to stem cell startup Garuda's $72 million series A last month.
As part of the $30 million commitment, Resilience has inked a five-year research and development license with the Ivy League school to develop biologics, vaccines, nucleic acids and cell and gene therapies.
Resilience's money will go toward faculty-initiated research dedicated to new therapeutic and biomanufacturing technologies formed in Harvard's labs. In turn, Resilience has the option to license technologies that come out of the projects.
Circle will likely be just the first in a clutch of companies formed under the collaboration to bring the new technologies into the clinic and onto the market. The new biotech comes from the lab of Lee Rubin, Ph.D., whose group has identified targets for spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and is also studying Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and autism.
“For six decades since the discovery of the satellite cell, it has not been possible to expand therapeutic numbers of satellite cells in vitro, until we made real headway on it at Harvard,” Rubin said in a statement. “We’re truly excited for the possible therapeutic impact of our innovations.”
Aside from Harvard, Resilience also teamed up with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia on biomanufacturing tech and development of new cell, gene and nucleic acid therapies. Terms of the deal, disclosed earlier this week, were kept under wraps.