PharmaSource Podcast

“If the data you give it is weak, the model becomes a liability rather than an asset. In regulated industries, that’s not just a technical failure; it’s potentially a compliance and an ethical failure as well,” says Amie Harpe. Amie Harpe spent 23 years at Pfizer’s global IT organization, leading quality and manufacturing systems programs worth up to $40 million across 65 manufacturing sites world...

At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Alexander Schäfer , Business Development Manager at Sharp, laid out the scale of the GLP-1 packaging challenge and identified the three collaboration failures most likely to prevent CDMOs and their pharma partners from meeting surging demand. Read the full article .

Container closure integrity (CCI) is a critical element of sterile product quality, but evaluating a CDMO’s CCI capabilities requires more than confirming that testing is available. The appropriate approach depends on the drug product, container closure system, manufacturing process, lifecycle risks, and applicable regulatory requirements. For pharmaceutical companies selecting or qualifying a CDM...

At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Giulio Cavalli , Principal Lead External Manufacturing, J&J Innovative Medicine; Neil Stevenson , Director, CMC Logic Consultancy; Marine Joly Battaglini , Founder, PharmDev; and Susan Reasoner , Chief Commercial Officer, BioDuro, examined how early-stage biotechs can avoid common selection mistakes, manage capacity concerns, and build CDMO relationships designed to l...

“Traditional staff augmentation says, ‘Here are the people you asked for.’ An outcome-led model says, ‘Here is the service or capability you asked for, and we are accountable and responsible for making it work.’” — Aisling Flanagan Aisling Flanagan, Global SVP of Professional and Managed Services at Catalyx, leads people-based services for regulated manufacturing environments. She works alongside...

Sponsored by Blue Jet Healthcare, this panel at CDMO Live Europe 2026 brought together Bernhard Boehm , Head of External Manufacturing Animal Health, Boehringer Ingelheim; Philip Coetzee , Director CMO Management, Daiichi Sankyo Europe; Fanny Eberhardt , Director Global Procurement, UCB; and Shiven Arora , Managing Director, Blue Jet Healthcare to debate how pharma companies are making network str...

“AI is marketed as such an approachable, ubiquitous thing that everybody thinks they can vibe code it. Unfortunately, a lot of companies are starting to think that way,” says Kat Kozyrytska. Kat Kozyrytska is a portfolio strategy and technology leader in life science technologies who has operated across organizations, including Sartorius and Thermo Fisher, and now advises across the life sciences...

“How good is your AI model? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what does your AI model actually help your company do?” Seungik Cho , founder of Sapiens Health, has spent the past year pulling apart the assumption in biomanufacturing that a better-predicting AI model means a better digital twin. His research argues the opposite: that optimizing AI for prediction accuracy can cause th...

At CDMO Live Europe 2026,   Dr. Olivier Aebischer , Deputy CEO at Interlabor Belp AG, demonstrated how a structured, dual-path analytical approach can identify manufacturing root causes in days, using two real contamination case studies from the lab’s operations.

“We can adjust and be flexible around equipment configuration, but we can’t be flexible around what is a clear communicator and an honest partner.” Damien Perriman is Chief Commercial Officer at ExoZymes, a Nasdaq-listed company using AI-enhanced enzymes to produce pharmaceutical and nutraceutical compounds without living cells. He spent two decades commercializing biotechnologies at multiple comp...

“Rather than saying that there’s a gap from the industry, I think there’s a listening gap from our governments.” Neha Dave is an independent EU Government Affairs Advisor based in Brussels, with more than 20 years of experience across the EU institutions, agency-side consulting at Weber Shandwick, and government affairs and public policy at MedTech Europe. She advises pharma and medtech companies...

Moderated by Raman Sehgal , Host of Molecule to Market, this opening panel at CDMO Live Europe 2026 brought together Melanie Wamsler , External Network Strategy Lead, Takeda, Rocco Paracchini , Vice President, Morpho, Kaan-Fabian Kekec , Partner, Simon-Kucher, and Kurt Nielsen , President, Longview Leader, to assess market conditions, capital discipline, geopolitical risk, and pricing in contract...

“There isn’t enough capacity for antibody-oligo conjugates out there today, full stop,” says Geoff Glass, CEO of Abzena. “And it’s really because of the volume requirements for the diseases.” Geoff Glass is Chief Executive Officer of Abzena, the end-to-end, fully integrated CDMO and CRO for complex biologics and bioconjugates. He brings 30 years in life sciences, including at Patheon, Avadel, and...

“If you look at the employment numbers in the manufacturing sector, it’s been absolutely flat for two years. The political noise has not driven that big wave of reshoring that we were expecting.”  After a decade of making the economic case for bringing manufacturing back to America, Rosemary Coates says the data tells a very different story from the press releases. Rosemary Coates is Executive Dir...

“No one is going to care about your project as much as you do.”  Steven Weissman is Vice President and Head of CMC at Cognition Therapeutics, a small pharma company outside New York City developing CT1812, a neurodegeneration candidate now through three Phase 2 trials in Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, and dry AMD. He spent 18 years in the process chemistry groups at Merck before moving i...

“Digital collaboration is a competitive advantage for everyone — for CDMOs and CMOs, it’s not a question of if you’re going to do it, it’s when. So how do you get ready for it?” At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Sham Afzalpurkar, CEO of Collabrix, presented a standards-based, AI-enabled framework for connecting sponsor-CDMO networks at scale, arguing that custom point-to-point integrations are structurall...

“When we go to an external partner, we need to show up as one single aligned organization. If we’re not aligned internally, the CMO ends up becoming the referee.” In pharmaceutical manufacturing, the quality of a CDMO partnership is rarely determined by the contract alone. According to Sabrina Mattos, Senior Director of External Manufacturing for the Americas at Elanco, what truly separates high-p...

At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Jeff Mason , VP and Head of US Sales at Samsung Biologics , demonstrated a risk-based, parallel approach to dual-site technology transfer that delivered a first GMP batch at a second facility within 90 days of initiation. Read the full article .

When relationships with contract manufacturers break down, the cause is rarely just the contract manufacturer. A panel of three sponsor-side executives examined the warning signs, the internal failures, and the governance models that determine whether a difficult relationship recovers or ends. At CDMO Live Europe 2026, a session, moderated by Raman Sehgal of the Molecule to Market podcast, brought...

“The least expensive CDMO on the first day of bidding may not be the optimum value CDMO three years later.” Choosing a contract development and manufacturing organization is not about who quotes the lowest unit price. It’s mainly about who keeps your clinical timeline intact. Prakash Savarirayan is a life sciences procurement leader with more than two decades of sourcing experience, over a dozen y...

At CDMO Live Europe,  Dr. Vijay Vittal Mathad , Chief Operating Officer of CRAMSN Research Park, outlined how a genuine end-to-end CDMO model reduces friction across the drug development lifecycle, from supply chain resilience to sustainability, drawing on 32 years of pharmaceutical development experience. Read the full article here .

Leon Tian , Director of US Project Management, ProBio,   walked through the cell line development, high-concentration formulation, and purification workflow, delivering a bispecific antibody tox batch from a single selected clone in 4 to 5 months at CDMO Live Europe 2026. Speed is always a top priority in biologic CMC development — but most of the time, speed trades against quality or regulatory c...

“Environmental Sustainability can be a substantial differentiator for CDMOs” Jürgen Wieland , Development Environmental Sustainability Lead at Novartis, is engaged to integrate sustainability into development processes, including reducing the emissions of clinical trials.  Jürgen brings over 20 years of finance and controlling experience to his sustainability role at Novartis, where he’s responsib...

At CDMO Live Europe 2026, a panel of pharma and CDMO executives examined how supply chains must be redesigned for a world of sustained geopolitical pressure, regulatory fragmentation, and accelerating demand, and where contracts, governance, and visibility fit in. This panel brought together  Steve Leonard , COO, Meribel;  Ryan Kelly , Interim CEO, Rx-360;  Frank Binder , Managing Director, GSCA;...

“Projects quite often realize too late that their R&D process cannot just be copy-pasted from the lab into the manufacturing facility.” Dr. Jenny Prange is Head of Project Management at the Regenerative Medicine Technologies Platform (RMTP) at Wyss Zurich, an accelerator embedded within ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. With a background spanning molecular biotechnology, a PhD in human...