PHARMACEUTICALS
Lab research at Almirall they do so when the whole situation is so uncertain?
Dania Chehab, head of EMEA pharma services at J. P. Morgan, agreed that the situation is difficult because investors do not like uncertainty. She has seen CDMO clients with European footprints use these to hedge against policy uncertainty in the US, while Big Pharma has invested more in the US. More generally, CDMOs are also planning around changes in customer needs.
Anil Kane, global head of technical and scientific affairs at Thermo Fisher Scientific, one of the world’ s largest CDMOs, said that having a global network of sites certainly helps to address the requirement. The company has European sites for clinical trials and supply and USbased solid-state manufacture.
Globalisation used to be a nobrainer, Amador said. Since COVID and other emerging geopolitical risks, it has become a“ shaky strategy”. Companies now need to think about supply chain from a resilience and reliability perspective as well as cost.
“ Localisation brings us security, agility and flexibility but in an environment where we face market access pressures, but costs will still have a say, especially with the US changing policies,” she added. It depends in part on how critical the drugs are: cost is more of a driver for commoditised ones.
Strategic – or not?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for CDMOs and their customers, the panellists agreed. The archetypal one-stop shop may be ideal for a small biotech with no in-house manufacturing capacity but transactional relationships are still part of the scene
Big pharma companies are more comfortable with complexity and dealing with multiple CDMOs with expertise in specific areas, Chehab said. Mid-size and smaller players are more likely to require deeper partnerships and end-to-end services. Investors know how hard and costly it is to get everything right and increasingly prefer to invest in focused platforms and players with differentiating capabilities.
In Roth’ s view, whatever their size, the key challenge for the PBOA’ s 35 members is following customer needs. Some cannot accommodate certain types of customers. Instead, they try to leverage a position based on their strengths.“ What we’ ve been involved in during the past year when more of this stuff is being discussed, is asking‘ Where does it make sense that we are pursuing companies in a certain field?’” he remarked.
For instance, with the heavy investment in cell and gene therapy, some pipeline companies have sought to become CDMOs as a hedge in case their R & D does not pan out and / or reimbursement problems arise, as they have in the US market. This fall-out has also led
MAR / APR 2026 SPECCHEMONLINE. COM
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