2025 GLP-1 Impacts Tell Us About CDMOs In 2026

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

When we began covering the nexus between GLP-1 drugs and CDMO capacity, there were two key questions:

• Could Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly (and followers) keep up supply via internal and external manufacturing to meet exponential demand?
• At the same time, would the CDMO market also have capacity to serve the thousands of drug sponsors needing assistance with their non-GLP-1 programs?

Now as we close 2025, we can answer those questions, and those answers inform of us of how resilient our industry is overall as we head into 2026.

The Shockwave Of Success

GLP-1 capacity questions took off early in 2024 when Novo Holdings acquired several Catalent sites to secure drug-product capacity for Novo Nordisk.

A headline from that moment: Novo Holdings Acquires Catalent, Shakes Up Outsourcing World

The “shake up” set off a scramble to secure capacity throughout the service-provider industry – capacity for all kinds of programs biotechs were advancing.

Some fears were overblown, but recalls a professional I spoke with, “in fact smaller customers suddenly couldn’t get slots they’d counted on for years.”

“It seemed like Novo and Lilly had booked the rooms, the machines, and even hired away some of the people.”

That final element may have had the longest impact on outsourcing overall. The hiring to staff both the GPL-1 manufacturers' internal needs and theCDMOs those manufacturers needed, drained skilled labor from across the CDMO landscape.

“It’s not quite poaching,” our source carefully said at the time. “Let’s call it matching headcount to demand.”

It did not match perfectly.

Only recently does it appear we have caught up to the skilled-worker gaps – along with the actual supply shortages of GLP-1 drugs – that ensued for a large part of the past two years.

I’d suggest, though, that while there were bottlenecks (and frustrations), what has transpired to rectify the situation positively demonstrates our industry’s capacity to respond to supply-demand imbalances and new (blockbuster) therapies.

We should take heart. We have shown we are a highly functional and flexible ecosystem of manufacturing and outsourcing.

Weight Loss, Thin Supply

To illustrate the above, perhaps no example is better than the API semaglutide for  Ozempic (for diabetes) and Wegovy (for obesity).

The FDA actually placed semaglutide injections on its drug-shortage list starting back in 2022, reflecting rising demand, and manufacturing struggles to meet it.

That opened the market for a supply-chain contingency we pay way too little attention to: compounding. Semaglutide was allowed by FDA to be made in certain compounding pharmacies and outsourcing facilities (under strict rules).

Whether you agree with this market mechanism or not, these compounding versions served as a bridge to immediate patient access (at, shall we say, interesting pricing).

Novo Nordisk for one was not happy. It raised safety concerns: dosage errors and the risk of impurity – even extreme cases where products included no detectable semaglutide.

This is well worth mentioning, but let’s leave this specific topic for a full treatment at another time.

Back to our narrative, in February of this year, the FDA formally declared the shortage of semaglutide injection products as solved, confirming that Novo Nordisk’s supply and manufacturing capacity could meet current and projected national demand.

In other words, the supply chain bent to rapidly advancing markets, but bounced back relatively quickly. If there is a point to all this, I believe that is it.

Sure, on the one hand, a recognized drug shortage lasting through a number of years (and temporarily requiring the “help” of compounders) may seem like a demonstration of a less than adequate drug-supply ecosystem.

But the demand for these drugs was exponential, and remains historic. We could also outline a parallel case study on Eli Lilly’s similar experience with shortages of Tirzepatide (Mounjaro / Zepbound), overcome by a flexible (and growing) manufacturing base.

For both Novo and Lilly, it was a massive undertaking. It required putting internal resources on overdrive, and uber-effective outsourcing to select external partners. 

Yes We Performed Well

Therefore, the answer to the question we started off this editorial with is a qualified “yes” – the Big Pharma GPL-1 drugmakers could keep up with exponential demand.

And a qualified “yes” to our second question as well. There was disruption to the innovators reliant on CDMOs during this period. Service providers did in fact abandon some customers, and ghosted potential newcomers.

So without making light of that, indications are that overall the outsourcing ecosystem in 2025 ends in balance and with a notable lack of supply-chain strains.

To be clear, though, the risk to fully adequate supplies of GLP-1 is not over. Some estimatate total GLP-1 sales will exceed $200 billion annually by 2031. Meeting that market need starts in earnest in 2026.

To grow capacity to meet that projected need, again using Eli Lilly, the company is investing massively in multi-billion production facility buildouts in the U.S. (and elsewhere.)

In the meantime, a number of CDMOs and fill-finish specialists have “converted” facilities and capabilities to serve GLP-1 producers of all shapes and sizes.

Also notable, because it shows the ebb-and-flow our outsourcing industry can achieve, is the number of CDMOs who have effectively jettisoned cell and gene capacities as that market is currently in a (investment-led) downturn.

In short, we are an adaptable ecosystem. Not perfect, and maybe not wholly proactive, but able to adjust admirably to client and market needs.

And so we have seen:

• Big Pharma building big (and buying facilites as well).
• CDMOs adjusting as per market demands – both up and down.
• Compounders ready to bounce when dire supply-chain straits materialize.

Before ending here, let's note that along with this supply-chain narrative of the year, outsourced manufacturing has had a trying number of months due to the tariff wars.

Yet here, too, efforts to minimize effects have proven equal to these difficult tasks.

Reviewing all this, it's reminiscent of some rather miraculous movements of just a few short years ago during the COVID supply-chain shocks.

Maybe 2025 was just another year of producing drugs for patients around the world.

So take a deep breath. Odds are high 2026 will bring us the same old thing.