Tag: Aldevron

  • A Front Row Seat for the mRNA Explosion – Aldevron’s Nate Russart Shares 

    A Front Row Seat for the mRNA Explosion – Aldevron’s Nate Russart Shares 

    The idea of mRNA therapy was conceived decades before it became a reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, mRNA vaccines have emerged as a powerful tool against new viral infections, mainly due to their versatility and rapid development. Nate Russart, Associate Director at Aldevron (a Danaher business), explains his excitement about advancing mRNA therapies from development to the clinic.  

    Headshot of Nate Russart
    Nate Russart, Principal Scientist, R&D, Aldevron 

    What attracted you to the job opportunity at Aldevron? 

    Before joining Aldevron, headquartered in Fargo, North Dakota, my wife and I were living in another state. When our daughter was born, we decided we would prefer to be near family to help with childcare. My wife was originally from Fargo, and I was looking for an R&D role. Aldevron was rapidly growing and had recently set up its R&D group, so it was a great fit. 

    Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role. 

    I’m involved in developing technology to offer new platforms, products and processes around DNA for Aldevron. Much of my work is involved in science but I also work cross-functionally with other departments to ensure that our advancements fit into the business needs of both Aldevron and our customers.

    Aldevron: Innovative Manufacturing Dedicated to Cell and Gene Therapy

    Aldevron is a premier manufacturing partner providing critical nucleic acids and proteins used to make gene and cell therapies, gene editing technologies, DNA and RNA vaccines. Its custom development and manufacturing services give scientists around the world the essential components to accelerate their research and develop revolutionary treatments for millions of people.

    For more than 20 years, Aldevron’s industry-leading technology and expertise has supported thousands of innovations, including the linearized DNA template for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. 

    Developing cell and gene therapies poses unique challenges, with complex manufacturing and regulatory landscapes. Since the beginning, Aldevron has supported these developments, putting its experience to work to help over 1,000 clients make their possibilities a reality.

    What does your day-to-day work look like?

    At this point in my career, I primarily oversee the work of other scientists, so I meet with my team to review data, plan for next steps, prioritize tasks and provide guidance around technical aspects of experiments. I also often assist on customer calls as a subject matter expert. 

    Why do you enjoy working for a leading science and technology company? 

    It’s exciting to be part of new breakthroughs while they are happening. In addition, through our patient advocacy initiatives, we get to see firsthand the impact our therapies make. Aldevron is not just creating products for people to enjoy—we’re helping to save lives or make lives better. 

    Are there any career highlights that are particularly meaningful to you? 

    I’m very proud of playing a key role in the development of the Alchemy cell-free DNA technology, which just launched in January (2025). I focused on creating new ways to improve the quality or reduce the cost of cell-free DNA while ensuring stakeholders get high-quality and timely DNA for their research programs. Instead of producing DNA through a traditional e. coli-based workflow, we developed a cleaner enzymatic process to produce the same material.  

    It’s not every day you get to take something from an idea in the lab to a service being extended to customers. It’s been very exciting to see this work go from initial ideas to a launched product.    

    Image of a man cropped at the chest
    Nate training for his fourth marathon—this one as part of the Emily Whitehead Foundation team. The foundation supports innovative childhood cancer treatments, such as CAR-T therapies, which are developed by many Aldevron customers. 

    Why do you think others in your field would enjoy a job at Aldevron? 

    At Aldevron our clients are always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cell and gene therapy. This is a very exciting field that’s progressing quickly through the explosion of mRNA vaccines during the pandemic and now gaining momentum in the approval of many cell and gene therapies.  

    Today, 15 commercial cell and gene therapy programs rely on Aldevron products and services. Working at Aldevron, we get a front-row seat to see these innovative programs advance to the clinic.

    How has working for Aldevron and Danaher helped you grow? 

    I was lucky to join Aldevron during a period of rapid growth and have had the opportunity to grow along with it. Using Danaher Business System (DBS) tools has enabled me to expand beyond just technical details and learn how to actively manage projects. For example, the Technology Development Process and Daily Management have given me the tools to more effectively track projects and deliver on established timelines.   

    Nate’s Interviewing Tips

    When Nate interviewed at Aldevron, the job description mentioned mRNA production through IVT. While Nate didn’t have any experience in producing mRNA, he did some research on it—which he found very interesting—and ended up discussing it quite a bit during the interview. Without doing that research, Nate isn’t sure whether or not he would have been offered the job. Here are few more tips from Nate: 

    • Apply quickly. For entry-level roles, we see lots of applications come in very quickly and we move into the screening process very soon after. If you wait several weeks to apply, the candidate selection process has likely already begun.   
    • Study the job posting and be able to talk about everything listed in it. It’s okay if you don’t have experience in everything, but you can show the interviewer that you’ve prepared for the interview and are able to learn new things. 
    • Always ask questions. Prepare some ahead of time. This shows that you want to understand the position, which will enable you to do your job better. 
    • Show personality. While the interviewer is trying to understand how well your education and experience will fit for the position, they will also want to know how well you will fit with the team and how enjoyable you will be to work with.

    How have you benefited from Danaher’s global footprint and multi-business structure? 

    We have a number of collaborations with other Danaher businesses, such as IDT and Cytiva, which would not be possible in a traditional organization. As Aldevron continues on its journey to implement DBS tools, I’m able to see how the other businesses make the most of these tools. By being able to speak the language of DBS, I am well-suited to explore opportunities at other Danaher businesses if I decide to pursue something different.  

    What does the future hold for your career? 

    I am transitioning into a director role soon, which means I will continue to work at a higher-level, coordinating cross-functional teams to bring new products and services to Aldevron. My focus will shift to longer-range planning and shaping strategy instead of the near-term technical questions that my current team focuses on. 

    What advice would you give potential candidates considering a role at Aldevron? 

    If you like working in a culture that’s centered on continuous improvement and want to be at the forefront of exciting and promising new therapies that impact human health, this is the place for you. 

    Work-life balance is important for everyone. Considering your growing responsibilities, how do you maintain that?

    I do my best to keep work at work—and Aldevron supports that goal. When I am at home, my focus is on family, my two young children, so I stick to a work schedule between the hours I drop off and pick up my kids. While in the office, I try to utilize my time as efficiently as possible and prioritize urgent tasks above those that can wait. After hours, I also enjoy running—I’m currently training for my next marathon in Fargo, North Dakota, in May of this year.

    After many years off, Nate ran the NY Marathon in 2024 (personally raising $8,000 for the Emily Whitehead Foundation) and is currently training for the Fargo Marathon.
    Nate, his wife, 3-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, whose basketball team he coaches.  

    Do you see any parallels between running marathons and your work at Aldevron? 

    Perseverance, for sure. Our work on the cell-free DNA process has taken a long time. It was important to stay focused on that finish line and trust that we would get there. 

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    Read other stories about life at Danaher:

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      From Intern to Innovator: A Systems Engineer’s Journey at Molecular Devices 

    • 4 Things I’ve Learned on My Journey to CIO – Bryan Smith Shares Some Perks of the Danaher Culture

    • From Academia to Industry: How Adam Chernick, PhD/MBA, Pivoted Roles to Enable Scientific Breakthroughs

  • Getting Acquired and Growing with the Danaher Business System

    Getting Acquired and Growing with the Danaher Business System

    When Angelica Meyer joined Aldevron in 2016 as a biomanufacturing operator, she didn’t know what the future had in store—for her career or for the company. Five years later, Aldevron became a Danaher operating company, and today, Angelica is a senior manager leading the new Manufacturing Support and Technology team. Below, she shares what it was like to go through the acquisition—including learning the Danaher Business System of continuous improvement—and why she calls her work “the most rewarding experience of my life.”

    What does Aldevron do, and what kind of impact does your work have?

    We do contract manufacturing, which means making biologics—plasmid DNA, mRNA and proteins—for our clients. Every project is different because we have clients all over the world and work with them at every stage, from the initial clinical phases all the way through to commercial products. Sometimes we’re taking their existing processes and executing on those, sometimes we’re working with them to develop a new process, and sometimes we handle all of that ourselves.

    As far as the impact of our work, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine is a good example; we supplied the plasma DNA Moderna used for all the different variants of the virus. Getting to be part of that collaboration has been amazing. Normally you don’t get to see a program go from initiation to patients nearly that quickly, but because of the pandemic, it was obviously a very compressed timeline. And the opportunity to contribute to a project that affected every single person in the world—it has been the most rewarding experience of my life, hands down.

    Danaher acquired Aldevron not long after the first vaccines rolled out. How has that changed the way you work?

    I believed going in that the acquisition would be extremely beneficial for us. That was especially true at that point in the pandemic, because procurement was a nightmare for so many companies, including us. Things were shut down, things were delayed. Before we joined Danaher, trying to get the materials and technologies we needed felt like being alone on one side of a tug-of-war. And then after the acquisition, suddenly we had all these other operating companies we could work with and learn from. Cytiva, Pall—we were able to talk to them about what our next steps should be in a way you never could if you weren’t part of the same parent company. It was an open door for collaboration.

    And I think being under the Danaher umbrella was especially appealing for me as someone involved in tech—my role isn’t within the R&D department, but my team does handle process development and biomanufacturing engineering; we sort of bridge manufacturing and R&D. So to join a company that’s so well-known for investing in development and gain all this potential to do new things—that was exciting.

    What about your introduction to the Danaher Business System (DBS)? What was it like to climb that learning curve?

    Danaher did bring DBS in relatively quickly, but it never felt invasive or aggressive. It wasn’t, “Learn all these acronyms and terms right away, and sink or swim.” It was, “Hey, here are some tools and structures that can make your work easier and better, and here are some people who can help you get those things online.” It was done very thoughtfully—working collaboratively, slowly making adjustments. They really emphasized that DBS is an ever-evolving process. When you have a metric in the red, that doesn’t mean you’re doing a bad job. It’s about continuous improvement.

    I think I was personally predisposed toward DBS because I love troubleshooting and solving problems—that’s one of the reasons I enjoy working in biologics so much; the field always throws you curveballs. But I do think it’s been valuable across the board. Daily Management, for example, is a visualization tool for keeping track of different elements of the business—that’s now pretty ubiquitous across all of the departments at Aldevron.

    Can you give us any examples of improvements DBS has helped the team make?

    We have been doing a lot of what we call kaizens, which are essentially workshops where you deeply evaluate a process and look for opportunities to streamline it. So far we’ve focused on big-picture issues such as safety programs and batch-record distribution, and we’re working our way down to smaller challenges. Kaizens are very structured, which I think is important—if you don’t have a specific process, it’s hard to know what you’re putting in and what you’re getting out.

    There’s also a lot of attention paid to getting the right people in the room. For the kaizen that led to our new “dock to stock” warehouse process, for example, it was critical to include the operators who work on the floor. Our goal was to cut out unnecessary work for them as they checked in materials. Before, we were treating everything the same way regardless of its product impact, which meant spending as much time on things like paper towels as we were on final vials. If you want to solve a problem like that, the operators are your subject matter experts—and then we also include people who work on any processes that process affects.

    The process doesn’t end with implementation—it’s kaizen, evaluate, kaizen, evaluate. Our goal isn’t to make everything perfect right now. It’s to continually improve, and as we do, identify other opportunities for improvements. But I can say we’ve already seen great results. Our processes have been streamlined significantly just in this first year within Danaher, and I think that really is because of using the DBS tools.

    What are you looking forward to right now regarding your growth and Aldevron’s?

    I look forward to every day because I always know I’ll get to help clients advance their clinical programs and reach more patients—but beyond that, Aldevron is so dynamic that I honestly have no idea what’s in store. A year ago, I never would have expected to be in this role; I started as a biomanufacturing operator, and now I’m getting to run a brand-new team.

    The same is true of Aldevron itself—I couldn’t have told you when I joined in 2016 that we’d see exponential growth almost every year, but that’s been our trajectory. And I think we’re just getting started; gene therapy is still relatively new in the field. There are a lot of visionary people at this company, and now we have the resources to bring in new technologies, expand the manufacturing we’re already doing and adapt to support innovations in the industry. So I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how we grow.

    Interested in joining Angelica and the rest of the Aldevron team? Check out all open roles across Danaher or join our talent community today.