Portals For Productive Communication

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Fourteen years ago, with no prior experience within our biopharma industry, Ammar Badwy landed a digital marketing role at a Dutch pharmaceutical wholesaler of raw materials.

It has spurred the rest of his career.

Duchefa Farma serves pharmacies and hospitals in the Netherlands, and the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. What surprised, perplexed and thus interested Badwy, he says, “was how inefficient the pharmaceutical industry is when it comes to finding reliable partners to provide active pharmaceutical ingredients (API).”

He set out to do something about it.

In 2017, at the age of 28, Badwy officially began his biopharma-industry journey by creating an online portal that “digitized the sourcing of API.”

When we spoke recently, he had just expanded the platform from that initial focus on API. He’s now connecting global drug and therapy sponsors to CDMOs for all of the variated development and manufacturing services they provide.

Today, he’s receiving some 140,000 unique visitors per month to Pharmaoffer.com. (He provided me the data to the platform to confirm those numbers.)

“I originally saw how you were so dependent on trading companies, middlemen, agents, importers, exporters, you name it,” he says.

“I thought this can be more efficient, and I started a platform for APIs where medicine makers can search and compare suppliers based on all the details relevant to them.”

The Digital Details

Some of the details he mentions for API include GMP certifications, FDA and other agency inspections, facility locations, and in what countries the API are actually produced.  

“There was a lot of communication happening on the platform,” Badwy recalls, “but we kept receiving a specific request from our clients – the API buyers.

“‘Hey,’ they kept saying,  ‘Can you help us with the initial search for the best CDMOs?  Can you help me find the most suitable partner for services?’”

That re-sparked Badwy to do “a little more research.”

“We learned just how complex this process is for selecting a CDMO that fits specific needs. So that, in short, is our new initiative.”

Readers may be thinking this certainly isn’t the first “database” or “platform” for researching and connecting with CDMOs. And a second thought might be none are as helpful as we’d hoped.

Because of that, and the fact Badwy’s business is expanding, it’s informative to learn of his initial experiences within the API marketplace that informed him of how to best facilitate communication between sponsor and service provider. 

To get his business up and running, he says, he first reached out to global API suppliers, such as Dr. Reddy’s, Polpharma, Suanfarma, and Shilpa (although today many smaller producers, with some of even a single API, are on the platform).

Next, he targeted the buyers, and here he mentions some Big Pharma such as Johnson&Johnson, Pfizer AstraZeneca, Sanofi, and Merck.

Additionally, he worked with compounding pharmacies, hospitals, and other research and development entities – “basically any organization that distributes or purchases APIs.”

When asked, Badwy clarifies that initially when he referenced “APIs” it was mostly related to those suppliers with product lists and stockpiled DMFs, most of the time for older products and generics, and thus the drug makers in need of those (legacy) products.

That then expanded to targeting those who, like most OutsourcedPharma.com readers, are creating novel medicines and therapies, and in need of the full services of drug development as well as the creation of novel APIs, and finding the CDMOs that can best help with those activities.

So Badwy's the evolution – his education –  progressed from a narrower focus on purchasing parameters to full-blown strategic partnerships.

Customer Service

The searing question for readers remains whether in fact this is indeed a digital marketplace to locate, and perhaps most importantly, receive adequate responses from CDMOs of interest.  

Sponsors today need to be highly discerning: Which CDMOs outshine the others in categories such as experience, know-how, reliability, quality, price, and the ultimate bane for so many biotechs, customer service.

Regarding customer service, even when successfully located and contacted – that is even when a legitimate, prospective customer comes calling, too many CDMOs are notoriously slow to respond (if they respond at all).

Badwy says that’s exactly where he’s focused.

Pharmaoffer.com will rank CDMOs, for example, by the alacrity with which they respond to requests for information and other messaging from prospective clients.

Badwy believes CDMOs have every reason to be more communicative on this digital storefront. Their activity will help generate informative reports on prospective buyers.

The costs associated with this analysis are included in the service's subscription for sellers (CDMOs). Buyers (drug sponsors) need only to sign up, a process we will discuss more in part two.

But for now, we know emerging and smaller biotechs continue to experience challenges in finding, and drawing the sustained attention of CDMOs. These developers are looking for a better way.

Even today, there is no set process beyond finding some personal methodology for creating CDMO target lists and sending out RFPs.

CDMOs, for their part, can’t seem to hone their marketing and sales in such a way as to efficiently gather, sort through, and validate leads.

Nor have they for the most part implemented more effectual customer service systems, so as not to leave potential clients frustrated and moving elsewhere.

So when a new service for CDMO communication comes along, we’ll take a look. And I did give Pharmaoffer.com a brief tryout.

It's obvious there is a lot of potential there.

However, as I mentioned to Badwy, it does feel like it's in the early stages of developing into a comprehensive (communication) solution, particularly for serving the needs of biotechs with limited resources.

To his credit, he agrees with that assessment, and says this iteration is “a conscious, careful start.”

“For the API market,” he says, “we have 3,000 suppliers listed. For the newly launched CDMO market for all contract services, we are building out deliberately. We have introduced an entrée to begin with, and have started with 200 companies as we launch.”

I think readers agree we should encourage him to keep going. The need is there.

And the need to learn a bit more from his digital prowess is there as well. That next.