Payments made to Advent previously were for Sawston to be scaled up and ready both for inspections and licensing and yes, if called upon, to make specials. That money is not payment in advance for a specific production level and doses. Patients pay for their own batches and that would be “revenue”. But yes, Advent has to have employees in place and be operationally prepared for production whether they get 50 orders or zero orders a month. That is the nature of this business.
Don’t confuse different payments for different things. One of the challenges for these companies making complex and alive drugs is their production facilities have to be set and ready previous to approval. In the past, they even had to have one major facility, ready before their trials started and then to keep it set over decades sometimes of a trial, bankrupting tiny companies, which is why shorts love biotech so much.
The advent of having CDMO’s, where the costs of such facilities were shared across many companies in that context reduced financial burdens, financial risks, operational challenges and risks and allowed more companies to bring more innovative drugs to market without raising billions of dollars up front.