Dispatches from the FT Global Healthcare and biotech conference
Experts: Outsourcing levels could push 80% if CMOs seize future demands
In a poll of 200 delegates at the Financial Times Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology conference in London, UK, 72% said personalised medicine and biologics will prompt the biggest changes to the established volume-based approach to drug production paradigm.
Peter Grant, CEO of Skyepharma agreed, telling attendees that making complex therapeutics using technologies and techniques primarily developed for “easy to genericise” small molecule drugs would not fit with drug industry efforts to control costs.
This will create an opportunity for contractors said Heiner Hoppmann, CEO of Aenova, who predicted that firms developing complex drugs would seek external manufacturing, citing the pattern that accompanied advances in the automotive industry to support his view.
“Overall the pharmaceutical industry has an outsourcing portion of the value chain of around 35%” Hoppmann said, adding that “in comparison, the automotive industry has an outsourcing level of over 80% so there’s still a way to go.
“The pharmaceutical industry is a very slow industry so it will probably take more than 20 years to come to a level similar to the automotive industry, but in our opinion the trend is very clear in supporting the next phase of development in the industry.”
With 22 manufacturing facilities across seven countries, and 600 customers, Aenova is the third largest CMO globally, behind Catalent and Patheon.
For such large players, Hoppmann predicted net sales of $1-2bn will rise to $5b-$10bn over the next decade, particularly those offering a broad range of services.
“They might offer services such as API, full development services including CRO, manufacturing packaging and distribution, and maybe even services of outsourcing distribution.”
He also described the six classes of customer from a CMO’s point of view and how their demands are changing the outsourcing industry, as shown in the accompanying gallery: