The Importance of CMO & CDMO in the Pharmaceutical World
Pharmaceutical companies today are under immense pressure to develop a robust vaccine for Covid-19. Cost containment continues to be another concern amidst the danger of any previously unimagined business interferences. Today, the race to outsource the manufacturing and development of life-saving drugs to reliable service providers is gaining speed.
The battle for end-to-end outsourcing with Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMO) and Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMO) takes on completely new meanings for smaller manufacturers in comparison to large pharmaceutical firms. With limited resources, smaller firms must rely on their outsourcing allies for additional services that several large firms retain. Although smaller firms have equal dependence as large drug companies on their CMO/CDMO partners, they are focused more on a unique set of service offerings.
Evolution in the CMO Market
The CMO market witnessed an evolution in the past couple of decades with a rise in service offerings to develop industrial processes, production cell lines, and analytical methods. By extending “one-stop” manufacturing and development services, CMOs can get customers early in their product-development timelines and retain them throughout the clinical development process and onto the commercial market once they are successful.
The existing push from pharmaceutical companies for outsourcing actions along a broader stretch of the supply chain is because of various factors.
Complex manufacturing processes and equipment are needed for expanding sophistication of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients and innovative molecular structures.
The development and production of medications require capital. With shrinking margins for generic drugs, firms are lowering the investment scale in this category.
Growing demand for generic biologics and medicines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 1,171 generic medicines in 2019, a larger quantity in comparison to all preceding years. In the same time, the FDA cleared 48 new biologics and drugs.
Growth of the CMO/CDMO Market
To keep pace with the contemporary biopharmaceutical industry trends and dynamic biotech industry paradigms, CMOs are moving away from the model of only “renting” production capacity to one that offers distinguished and widespread development and production support. CDMOs and CMOs today offer several value-added and dedicated services for customers with early-stage development needs. As the market for gene and cell therapies and Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADC) has expanded, CDMO and CMO markets have countered by providing dedicated services. Service providers today are offering vertically integrated suites of services since this strategic shift, such as:
Focused production processes and capabilities for ADCs with powerful tumor chemotherapy agents.
CMO technology and dedicated capacity to manufacture ADCs
Comparability studies that entail the use of advanced instrumentation and orthogonal analytical methods to fully characterize complex molecules.
Enhanced execution and analytical development that include combining product characterization technology to help early and late-stage development.
CDMO distribution of a master cell bank after obtaining customer protein sequence for a product, thereby accelerating time to clinic and lowering development time.
Patented cell line development technologies like patented transfection vectors combined with strong parental cell lines of established pedigree that are augmented to develop in suspension and in media without animal-derived-elements.
Virtually Outsourced Model
Unlike traditional outsourcing, small-market customers make use of the virtually outsourced solution with their CMO/CDMO allies to obtain API and other components. Virtual producers and smaller firms with reduced human and financial resources collaborate with these firms.
Several virtual outsourcing companies are large entities so proceeds alone are not the distinguishing quality of businesses that seek the virtual outsourced model. However, many businesses practising this method are smaller with inadequate resources. Irrespective of their bottom line, such clients often rely on their outsourcing affiliate for project management tasks that are internal functions within most bigger firms.
The objective of pioneering CMO/CDMO allies to provide ‘end-to-end’ solutions changes depending on the preferred client base. Larger-scale CMO/CDMO firms start their end-to-end services with production and development of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients and make headway through each service with the help of routine oversight by the customer. This outsourced model centers on large firms with presence across the world. These firms have internal departments with a particular understanding of quality assurance, regulatory compliance, sales and marketing, and pharmaceutical development that operate alongside their CMO/CDMO affiliates.
