56TWENTYFOURSEVENBIOPHARMA Issue 1 / March 2025 CPHI REPORT CDMOs need to smell the opportunity and not be caught napping behind the planning curve in preparing for CPHI Frankfurt (October 28-30), as we enter a golden few years for pharma outsourcing. The event will be the largest ever in pharma’s history – with 60,000 attendees and 2500 companies. Ahead of DCAT Week 2025, the De Facto team looks back at the most recent CPHI Annual Report analysis and its implications for pharma and notably outsourcing in the remainder of 2025. When we wrote the analysis for CPHI Milan last year it was an incredibly uncertain time for the industry, yet as some of these issues have passed others are now rearing their heads. How we all long for the 2019 serenity of steady pharma growth, which has now been replaced by a seemingly permanent era of macro shocks, both upward and downward. So… bearing in mind – and irrespective of your political standpoint – the new administration in the USA has clearly thrown a proverbial cat among our pharma pigeons, with the ground now shifting daily. What does the year ahead hold? Well, take a step back and we think many of the longer-term trends still hold true. Our industry is built on lengthy development cycles, a healthy funding environment and, of course, innovation that is increasingly built on global partnering. So let’s start with the recent cuts in the NIH funding, which is clearly a negative for earlystage research, so vital to pipelines in the USA. The good news is that the real pass through [funding cut] implications – to first research and then inevitably to CROs and CDMOs – may not yet be felt for more than a year, which is a proverbial ice age in the current political climate. It’s early days but our (monopoly) money is therefore on a reprieve for many of these projects – hopefully the administration will see funding cuts here are likely to have a negative real-term economic implications for the USA. In our view, federal funding for research is money well spent in the most part, having a clear economic multiplier through what it enables both direct and indirect. However, putting that aside, let’s look at the immediate trends, and again with the caveat of
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