‘One Billion Doses On Day One’: Vaccine Company Claims World-Changing Innovation
Curious about what motivates the company that just acquired UF startup and UF Innovate | Sid Martin Biotech graduate Ology Bioservices? Anger at the length of time it is taking to get vaccines to fight Covid. This story in Forbes is a picture of Resilience, a new player in the town of Alachua.
It’s all come down to Pfizer and Moderna. With Johnson & Johnson’s “one-and-done” shot on pause, America’s race against the virus and its variants now relies on our ability to flawlessly manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of the new mRNA vaccines – at warp speed. And previous quality control issues at a Pfizer plant, on top of Emergent BioSolutions fiasco with the J&J vaccine, are a stark reminder that manufacturing medicine is not easy.
Robert Nelsen, the top biotech investor on our annual Midas List of the best venture capitalists, figures there’s got to be a better way. As numerous companies started developing Covid-19 vaccines last spring, he was worried that they wouldn’t get manufactured fast enough. That meant there would be lots of avoidable death which made him angry (his Twitter bio ends “F—k Covid-19”). And when Bob Nelsen gets mad, he starts a new company. That firm, National Resilience officially, or just Resilience as it’s known, came out of stealth in November with $800 million in funding from Nelsen’s Arch Venture Partners and a who’s who of top-drawer VC firms and pharmaceutical companies.
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