ARTICLES BY LOUIS

• Launch Your Career At A CDMO

  6/20/2022

  Irfan Ali Mohammed went from university in New York directly to working at a CDMO in Maryland. Years later, I ask him on behalf of professionals starting out in the drug industry today: Is starting a career at a CDMO a wise decision? Here's Mohammed's reply, and more.

• Build A Great Company, Not An Acquisition Target

  6/13/2022

  A biotech’s notable success along the development/clinical path likely results in an acquisition by a larger organization. The paradox: Not planning for such acquisition brings a higher probability of that transpiring. Plan instead to build a great and sustainable company.

• Did The CDMO Industry Just Go Woke?

  6/9/2022

  The last time I covered a CDMO waltzing on Wall Street was in 2014. It felt like a game-changer. Have we now taken a further leap of some sort? I suspected as much when learning of the rebranding of Recro CDMO as: Societal CDMO. The company responded.

• Beware The Manufacturing Bottleneck: Lessons From Inside

  6/6/2022

  Steven Kelly, President & CEO, Carisma, a biotech with a CAR M therapy in phase one, is a repeat-CEO. “I’ve had a varied experience, and different functional responsibilities,” he says, "but when I think about manufacturing, two experiences stand out for me.” 

• How Do You Due-Diligence Novartis?

  6/1/2022

  An emerging biotech needed to find a CDMO to scale up its cell-therapy product. The search was proving difficult, until a relatively untested CDMO emerged: Novartis. Carisma Therapeutics CEO Steven Kelly explains how his company did due diligence on a Big Pharma.

• An Infantile Supply Chain

  5/27/2022

  Imagine a country with a $4 billion, government-regulated market for a life-vital product supplying a large and vulnerable part of its population. And a woefully inefficient supply chain and management of it all. 

• Optimism Is Not A Strategy For Outsourcing

  5/26/2022

  When you embark upon your drug development program, and connect that to patients, you have to be optimistic. Optimism is a biopharma’s opening gambit. Danger lurks, though, when optimism gets codified in unrealistic, aspirational planning and timelines.

• We Need More University-Based CDMOs

  5/24/2022

  What the outsourcing world needs now is university-based or -affiliated, CDMOs. So says Joanne Beck, COO, Boston Pharmaceuticals, and whose career has spanned Amgen, Abbott/AbbVie, Shire, and Celgene.

• Breaking Down The CDMO Size Barrier

  5/16/2022

  We recently discussed a “mutual growth” strategy for working with smaller to mid-sized CDMOs. Now we’re on to a “bigger-than-you” strategy for biotechs working with “Big CDMO.”

• Here's How To Grow With Your CDMO

  5/9/2022

  There's an opportunity - and strategy - for a biotech to grow as your CDMO partners are growing, says a former Genzyme executive and now industry consultant. And if the CDMO is already big, there's a plan for that as well.