CDMO & Supplier Partnerships: How are relationships evolving to foster agility and innovation?
In an era where the pharmaceutical and biotech landscapes are rapidly evolving, the relationship between Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMOs) and their suppliers is undergoing a significant transformation. During this year’s DCAT Week round table, industry leaders gathered to explore how these partnerships are being reshaped to enhance agility and drive innovation. As companies face increasing pressures to accelerate product development and navigate complex supply chain challenges, a collaborative approach has become essential. This article takes a closer look at the insights shared during the event, showcasing the essential strategies and best practices that are helping CDMO and supplier partnerships succeed in today’s ever-changing market.
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CordenPharma
Dr. Stephan Haitz, Chief Commercial Officer of CordenPharma International
In today’s ever-shifting pharma landscape, CDMO flexibility is key. For CordenPharma, this starts by building partnerships on a strong foundation of trust, with a focus on identifying innovators’ needs and delivering on them with a wide breadth of flexible capabilities and scientific expertise to ensure seamless outsourcing across their drug development lifecycle.
The adaptability to deliver small to large-scale development and manufacturing from drug substance to drug product comes from continuous efforts across our global teams to anticipate market trends, determine innovations that keep pace with those trends, and make large strategic investments across all six technology platforms that forge an agile path which fosters innovators’ supply chain resiliency.
In terms of innovation, our Technology & Science Advisory Board, or TSAB, comprised of eight world-class experts from academia and industry, provides technological and scientific expertise that helps identify investment areas aligned with customer needs.
In 2025, these investments span from small molecule expansions in Oral Solid Dosage technologies for encapsulation, blister lines, and roller-compactors, including the ability to formulate oral peptides, and the addition of a new aseptic fill & finish injectable production line for Pre-Filled Syringes (PFS) with full isolator technology, to our record €1 billion investment over the next three years in building and / or expanding small, medium, and large peptide manufacturing at our new site outside Basel, Switzerland and CordenPharma Colorado (US) facility respectively.
The capacity for integrated supply also reinforces CDMO agility. CordenPharma’s unique position as a market leader in small to large-scale peptide drug substance, sterile injectable fill-finish, and oral solid dosage manufacturing for peptide-based therapeutics exemplifies the way true end-to-end support helps innovators navigate the increasing complexity of their projects.
Another way CDMO & supplier partnerships evolve is through the importance of a clear sustainability plan that strives for environmentally conscience pharma supply both upstream and downstream. In March 2025, the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) approved CordenPharma’s near-term science-based emissions reduction target ambitions in line with a 1.5°C trajectory, currently the most ambitious designation available through the SBTi process, reflecting our commitment to transparency in providing both customers and suppliers with our sustainability aims over the coming years.
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Quotient Sciences
Thierry Van Nieuwenhove, CEO of Quotient Sciences
CDMO relationships with pharma and biotech clients are increasingly shifting from transactional models toward more integrated, collaborative partnerships. This is driven less about accelerating only for the sake of speed, but more about enabling a more controlled and responsive process to drug development. Additionally, CDMOs offering integrated services and a collaborative approach will be best positioned to help their clients navigate uncertainty and make more efficient use of resources.
At Quotient Sciences, using our Translational Pharmaceutics® platform as an integrated model for drug development is a primary way we enable greater agility for clients. These programs help foster innovation by breaking down silos between functions that have normally operated separately. When teams are aligned under one framework, it becomes easier to identify development risks early, but also keeps development more controlled and on-course because we have oversight of the entire supply chain. For these reasons, we can adapt quickly to support decision-making across the entire development lifecycle.
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Abzena
Rhonda Gates, Vice President of Supply Chain, Strategy & Transformation at Abzena
At Abzena, we’re moving beyond transactional interactions to create integrated, strategic CDMO and supplier relationships. As biopharma grows more complex, we build collaborative, trust-based alliances that enable agility and shared outcomes.
We engage earlier in product development to streamline supply chain design, capacity planning, and technology strategies, ensuring scalable solutions. This proactive collaboration invites our partners to drive innovation rather than execute actively.
By building a digitally connected network, we can leverage real-time visibility and synchronized planning—essential components for rapid, confident decisions. While ongoing, these efforts are critical to anticipating needs, responding to changes, and making data-driven improvements across the value chain.
Ultimately, agility emerges from alignment. When CDMOs and suppliers unite as seamless extensions of each other, we unlock new levels of performance. This synergy fuels our commitment to delivering high-quality therapies to patients—faster and more reliably.
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Ecolab
Stacey Treichler, Senior Director of Global Marketing and Strategy Ecolab, Purolite™ Resins
A key theme at this year’s DCAT was speed and cost efficiency. Some biotech funding has rebounded post-COVID, but uncertainty remains, with many biotech’s cautiously managing their run rates and pipelines. To serve these biotech customers, CDMOs continue to accelerate their timelines and streamline costs. As a result, suppliers must be agile and well-positioned to help CDMOs realise that speed while providing cost efficiencies.
Supply security was another key theme this year’s DCAT, as regulatory guidelines continue to evolve. Innovators haven’t forgotten the drug supply shortages during the pandemic and are increasingly interested in building redundancy in manufacturing, including dual supply of critical raw materials. Suppliers with robust supply continuity strategies will be critical partners to CDMOs as they help mitigate risks for innovators.
Finally, pipeline complexity continues to increase, with CDMOs encountering new drug formats that pose new manufacturing challenges. CDMOs require suppliers with a broad toolbox for new therapies and are looking for suppliers that can react to new trends, quickly innovating to bring novel solutions.
Naturally, a key theme at DCAT was again collaboration and partnership, and this is more critical than ever for CDMOs and their suppliers as they partner to meet the industry’s evolving needs.
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Mabion
Marty Henehan, Vice President of Business Development – Head of North America of Mabion
Every time I come back from a conference like DCAT Week, I am reminded how much the language of partnership has changed. We’re no longer talking about one-sided service models.
Today’s CDMO-sponsor-supplier relationships are built on shared outcomes. People often ask what agility really means in that context. To me, it means this: when a client calls on Friday with a change in scope, and by Monday we’re on a call with our supplier.
Not negotiating but planning how to make it happen. That kind of responsiveness only works when your relationships are solid. At Mabion, we’ve built a network of partners who know our priorities and trust our decisions.
And we return that trust. We don’t just ask for faster timelines. We ask what is needed to achieve them, and we listen. That mutual understanding has helped us deliver high-impact results under tight timelines.
It’s not glamorous – sometimes it’s a lot of late nights and creative problem-solving. But it is also what distinguishes great partnerships apart from good ones. At Mabion, we work with partners who are as invested in solving problems as we are like Cytiva or Sartorius. In our world, agility is built day by day.
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Tjoapack
Joe Compton, Senior Director of Global Business Development at Tjoapack
At DCAT Week 2025, one of the hot topics for Tjoapack was how the packaging landscape is evolving to meet the demands of increasingly complex and personalised therapies.
The growing need for specialised solutions, especially for temperature-sensitive treatments and custom configurations, has pushed us to rethink how we support our partners with greater agility and precision. We’ve made significant investments to expand our cold chain capabilities and scale up our packaging capacity for injectable formats, including syringes, vials, and auto-injectors.
One of the key enablers of this evolution has been our ability to automate or semi-automate final packaging and labeling processes, all while keeping strict control over time and temperature. This ensures that products are returned to cold storage quickly, maintaining their integrity and compliance.
Beyond packaging, we’re increasingly serving as a logistics hub for our clients, handling global distribution for therapies that require meticulous handling. These aren’t just operational enhancements; they’re strategic decisions that support more personalised, responsive delivery models.
What’s clear is that CDMO and supplier relationships are becoming more integrated and collaborative. By investing in flexibility, digitalization, and infrastructure, we’re better positioned to innovate alongside our partners and help them bring breakthrough therapies to patients, faster.
