Awards, Revelations, Outsourcing For Success

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Each year I serve as editor of the Life Science Leader CMO Leadership Awards issue, published in March. This includes writing a “From The Editor” that leads the publication. I’d like to bring some of those comments to all our readers here at our OutsourcedPharma.com home.

For those still not familiar with our Awards (this year’s virtual presentation is here), we’ve entered our second decade, and they remain the most meaningful outsourcing accolades in in the world. In fact, as we’ll discuss more below, they continue to rise in importance to our readers.

The biggest reason for that is how the Awards are decided:

Outsourced Pharma and Life Science Leader employ our research arm, Industry Standard Research (ISR reports), to present the world’s bio and pharma outsourcing professionals (that’s you) the best-in-class CDMOs, based on a fair and intelligently designed survey.

Fair and intelligent because ISR receives direct analysis of CDMOs exclusively from existing and recent customers. CDMOs are adjudicated based on categories which have also been determined as the most important by drug development and manufacturing outsourcing professionals.

Those categories are: accessibility to management; capabilities; compatibility; expertise; innovation; quality; on-time delivery, reliability; reputation; right-first-time; service; state-of-the-art; strength of science.

Here’s my 2022 message (slightly edited).

From The Editor

“We might have expected to be focused heavily on this, the year 3 CE (Covid Era).

But what we’ve discovered something different:

We’ve moved forward collectively as an industry, despite the COVID circumstances, to re-enter the broader historicism of the year 2022 regarding our drug development and manufacturing outsourcing strategies and tactics.

Don’t get me wrong: we still need to and do cover how the pandemic impacted our lives and livelihoods, both short-term and long. How it catalyzed reconfigurations of some of our supply chains; reconstituted to varying degrees our risk analyses and tolerances; added weight to geographic and other fundamental considerations; and most profoundly, brought a new existentialism to our overall thinking behind the meaning of core capability and capacity needs, and overall operations strategy.

More than a few readers may have learned this:

We can get through a global pandemic – one even of epic proportions when measured in recent human history – pretty darn well. Our supply-chain strategies, and implementation of which, have proven sound.

However, whether your programs and organization faired relatively well or otherwise, the importance of continuing to advance the knowledge, best practices, and outcomes of outsourcing remains the critical work of wise men and women.

For sure, this is not a trend that will reverse anytime soon: We outsource more than ever — even as emerging biopharma organizations consider more building strategies than in the recent past.

Therefore, while we increasingly recognize the inherent risks to outsourcing activities, we are more determined to have them mitigated, particularly as we deal with further gyrations induced by ever-novel drug and therapy programs and modalities, new technologies, your innovative development platforms, and your pursuit of more responsive manufacturing options.

Today, we’ve a heightened recognition biopharma customers need their CDMOs to  proactively engage the flow of this historicism to serve you optimally — or perhaps not at all.

How can you best determine which of these CDMOs are in fact in that vanguard?

One way is to engage with our 2022 CMO Leadership Awards issue.

Another is to continue doing exactly what you are at this moment: engage with OutsourcedPharma.com, where your peers and knowledge-leaders discuss drug development and manufacturing outsourcing day in and day out.

Because this is year 3 CE.

It comes with varying hurdles to supply chains both upstream and down, and a time period pitching us inflation, worker shortages, and concerns for the health and well-being of our professionals as we all try to better the lives of patients, a robust and current analysis of potential partners has never been more important.

You need a guide to the best CDMOs out there, and as much objective information on them as possible. Many of you today lean heavily on virtual and lean models for development and manufacturing. Absent highly successful outsourcing outcomes, you could face serious setbacks to individual programs or your entire organizations — whether you are an emerging or established business.

Nobody benefits from a biopharma industry that cannot continue to partner optimally for its drug development and manufacturing activities.

I offer our assistance in ensuring just the opposite — that you have tools to select the right CDMOs to bring you prosperity, and to bring your patients new drugs and therapies.

Congratulations to all our CDMO award winners. They are recognized by their customers as the best at what you do for them.

And congratulations to all our readers; every day you do your level best to uncover and carefully employ best practices, and assiduously select and manage the right partners — a recipe for success in any year.