Speciality Chemicals Magazine NOV / DEC 2026 | Page 5

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Submission Guidelines:

We invite feature articles from industry, consultants, and academia. Topics should cover technical, chemistry, regulatory, or business issues in the fine and speciality chemicals sectors. We also welcome opinion pieces on current sector issues.

Feature articles should be 800 to 1,500 words. Include at least one image, figure, diagram, or table for every 500 words. Opinion pieces can be shorter. We review and edit all submissions to ensure they meet our style and values. We do not publish placed news stories.

Articles should link to a scheduled feature or address a broad sector audience. You can also submit more general topics under our‘ Special Features’ category.

I came back from CPHI in Milan on 6-8 October without two things I wanted to bring back with me, vizt. my mobile phone and my voice recorder, and with two things I did want to bring back with me, vizt. blisters on both feet.

The lessons, I suppose, are ones that I already knew:( 1) Even seemingly comfortable shoes may not save you when you are walking all day every day for a three-day show and doing three to four times the 10,000 steps per day you are meant to do but probably don’ t.( 2) Make sure you know where everything is. Will I never learn?

The voice recorder was to have supplied the quotes for the Pharma Special article in this issue( pages 16-21), which we run in every November-December edition as a look at the current state of the pharmaceutical industry and its suppliers based on what the industry tells me at CPHI. Fortunately I could just about decipher my own strange form of shorthand to put it together.

The cycle of investment and acquisition is constant in this market sector and there was plenty of activity to report on. What struck me this year from the vantage point of completing the issue is just how often I had to update the feature as the trends the people I spoke to on the show floor in Milan continued and accelerated.

The most obvious example is from the bellwether of the sector, Lonza. In the runup to Milan, it had announced a licence agreement for a specific type of inhibitor for dual-payload antibody-drug conjugates( ADCs) and broke ground on a new commercial-scale, PSD-4 spray-drying facility, addressing the trends to investment in new modalities and US-based facility to serve the world’ s largest market locally.

Since then, Lonza has also announced plans to convert existing mid-scale bioconjugation manufacturing suites for into a standardised single-use platform by 2027 and has acquired the US CDMO business of Merck KGaA( page 7), adding five more sites active in such hot areas as conjugates, payload linkers and viral vectors. This is far from the only example of late-breaking news from CDMOs.

As the Pharma Special also details, we are still seeing very strong growth in other modalities beside ADCs, including oligonucleotides and above all peptides, where the GLP-1 class remains the biggest force for change in the industry right now and perhaps ever. CDMOs are making major strategic decisions on whether or not to invest in this field, and how to, aware that this may be the most important decision they will ever make.

One interviewee I quote in the Pharma Special, from a CDMO that has decided against joining the scrum to get into GLP-1s, said that China“ has built whole cities” around them. It is scarcely an exaggeration. Another executive at an Indian CDMO estimated that WuXi STA alone has more than three times the turnover of all the Indian companies put together. The scale at which China sometimes operates in the industry is staggering, yet still partially hidden.

And hidden away in all of this, little mentioned by analysts and even less cared for by the financial community, are small molecules. For the most part they are not the focus of major investment and yet they are still the majority of the molecules in use and in development. And I suspect they will be the workhorse of the industry for many years to come as these wonderful but highly targeted and often insanely expensive new modalities come through.