Relationship Equity With CDMOs Is Real, Take It From A Packaging Pro

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Just two months short of a decade ago, when Dan Marasco was global lead of packaging materials and medical devices sourcing at Bristol Myers Squibb, I started an editorial with a kitchen-table talk between him and his parents that went like this:

“Mom, Dad, I’ve been accepted at Rochester Institute of Technology to study packaging.”

“RIT? Wonderful, son! Did you say you’re majoring in marketing?”

“No, Packaging …  Packaging Science.”

“You’re going to study how to make boxes?”

We documented how Marasco always had biopharma packaging on his palate. But throughout his career, he has also weaved that interest into a mosaic of roles, at Merck, BMS, and Shire/Takeda.

Those additional roles include development and production procurement, senior manufacturing supervisor for sterile filling, sourcing manager for external/contract manufacturing, head of external supply operations, and drug product manufacturing.

Now some ten years since that first editorial, I catch up with Dan, with a specific purpose in mind:

Learn what that young man with the penchant for packaging eventually brought to those other roles, and how it applied to working with CDMOs.

New Experiences Keep Coming

First, we deal with the news that Marasco was caught up in Takeda’s layoffs the beginning of this year.

He tells me he loved the professionals he worked with, and his role as Head of External Supply Operations, Drug Product Manufacturing & Packaging.

It was his variated background in packaging, manufacturing and strategic sourcing, and experience working with external partners, that helped him secure that role in 2017.

“It took a series of interviews,” he says. “That I had directly supported external manufacturing operations for nine out of my sixteen years in strategic sourcing was a big plus.”

“That and all the supplier-relationship management from being in procurement,” he adds. “That experience is completely translatable to direct relationship management with CDMOs.”

He adds:

“Now more than ever, external manufacturing remains a people-centered business – a role focused on managing relationships between the sponsor and external partners.”

“And it's relationship equity you're building along the way.”

Relationship Equity Is Real

Marasco has been involvement in mega-launches over his career, including for VIOXX, SINGULAIR, JANUVIA/JANUMET, GARDASIL, and OPDIVO.

However, and despite the GLP-1 blockbuster markets and some other lesser exceptions, Marasco says nowadays it's more about targeted treatments and rare-disease indications. These therapies require much lower material demand, and deft sponsor/service provider handling.

“Today,” he says, “most all of us are smaller customers with smaller projects for CDMOs.” He feels he's gathered wisdom for such experiences.

Any sponsor’s spend is significant at a specific site, he says, because it helps answer questions such as:

 'What's our overall influence (if any) at this supplier?' 'What’s our leverage at the particular site where our work is being performed?’

Marasco says you can gain influence and leverage even at the larger CDMOs if, for example, you can become an important customer at one or two sites within that CDMO’s network.

Sounds like a solid strategy. Yet readers – and Marasco himself – know even this bit of leverage at a CDMO can prove ephemeral. If that is the case, he says, “You have to play nice by developing a meaningful win-win deal.”

“I don’t mean that in any negative connotation,” Marasco explains.

“This isn’t out of some disingenuine thought process. It comes from a good place. It’s always a challenge to understand how we can be a better customer for the CDMO.

“The CDMO sales side is always trying to figure out how they can sell us more services,” Marasco continues, “but often we’re just not able to deliver the volumes and the spend that comes with it.”

“Therefore, we need to figure out how we can be a better customer, because when push comes to shove and I need the CDMO to move an order up, for example, I have to lean on the relationship equity that I’ve built.

“My experience tells me it is a real thing. Conversely, if you're just a nuisance or you're adversarial with a CDMo, you're not going to get that assistance you desire.”

Packaging A Career

Back to the package.

Despite the growing complexity of packaging (at all stages) in our industry, and including for cell and gene therapy applications and the exciting challenges they bring, Marasco says the field can be rewarding in itself, or seen by new employees as a stepping-stone to other positions.

His longevity as a packaging engineer has meant he could “walk the talk with the scientific and technical experts involved in packaging,” whether it was internal stakeholders or component suppliers and contract packagers.

Even the salespeople at the contract packagers are technical, he says. “Nobody is just selling you a bottle or a vial.”

“I came to understand the different aspects, and with that you gain a sort of respect.” That, he says, “can result in better outcomes all around.”

But as mentioned above, Marasco moved on from the packaging discipline at times, and he recalls for us a scene at Merck.

Although he was working on “all these amazing projects,” his title was 'Package Design Engineer,’ and he started wondering when he’d get to actually design something.

“I learned only the professionals with decades in the organization got those roles there,” he explains. He was being buttoned up as a project manager.

“In many biotech organizations, if it’s a tablet, it's going in this bottle or that blister. If it's sterile, this vial or that syringe with this stopper. There is not a lot of design. For me the mandate was, 'Manage this program and hit the milestones, such as filing and launch.’

“Yes, it was still challenging and extremely rewarding. At a certain point in my career, I led the outsourcing of 50 products in two years,” he adds with a mixture of disbelief and pride of accomplishment.  

“But this did contribute to my desire to move on from packaging technology to other aspects of our industry.”

Moreover, Marasco began to wonder whether his next step should be to another Big Pharma, or maybe he should try his hand at a biotech start-up?

That question is yet to be answered, but next we'll pursue some specific outsourcing advice from him to those smaller sponsors specifically.