Novartis on What Great CDMO Partnerships Actually Look Like

“Don’t pick a CMO that just agrees with you.”Isabel Feuerstein is Head of Business Development for EU and Asia CMO at Novartis, where she shapes the company’s contract manufacturing strategy across key global markets. Mark Schiefermeier leads the manufacturing unit at DS Schaftenau, one of Novartis’ critical drug substance manufacturing facilities in Austria, overseeing technical execution and quality systems that underpin Novartis’ external manufacturing commitments.In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Isabel and Mark explain why technical credibility, real transparency, and a willingness to challenge clients are the foundations of a high-performing CDMO relationship — and how Novartis is positioning its CMO business for the future of biologics.Read more.

"Every milliliter lost translates to delayed timelines and increased costs."For early-phase biotech companies working with limited API batches, this is the central challenge of sterile injectable manufacturing. Peter Mollison, CEO and co-founder of Eramol, a UK-based pharmaceutical CMO, has built an entire facility around solving it.Peter Mollison and David Cox, Site Director at Eramol, joined the PharmaSource podcast to discuss the company's new purpose-built sterile injectable facility opening in Q2 2026 in Sittingbourne, Kent. The 11,000-square-foot site features a 2,000-square-foot GMP Grade A/C/D clean room suite engineered to achieve less than 1% material losses, well below the industry standard of approximately 10%.In this episode, Peter and David explain the engineering decisions behind the low-waste design, how the facility's end-to-end capabilities simplify outsourcing for biotech, academia, and research clients, and what it takes to build a sterile manufacturing site that meets 2023 EU GMP Annex One standards.Read more.

“One day lost during a clinical phase is one day of peak sales that is lost — always.”Nicolas Ragot, Chief Executive Officer of Delpharm, brings over three decades of pharmaceutical manufacturing expertise, having started his career as a process engineer at Eli Lilly before progressing through technical and leadership roles at Procter & Gamble Pharma and GSK. He joined Delpharm in 2018 as Chief Operating Officer and assumed the CEO role in 2024.In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Nicolas explains why supply reliability, digital standardization, and long-term partnership thinking are the strategic pillars that allow Delpharm to differentiate in an increasingly consolidated CDMO market — and why time to market is the single most important criterion any biotech should use when selecting a manufacturing partner.Read more.

“We’re witnessing what I would consider the most structurally disruptive pharmaceutical moment I’ve seen in my career—and it’s being driven by consumers.”Ryan Kelly, Interim CEO and Senior Director of Supply Chain Security and Brand Protection at Rx-360, has seen pharma’s direct-to-consumer transformation from multiple angles—building pharmacy operations at Amazon during the PillPack acquisition, scaling the largest cash pharmacy in the U.S. at Chewy, and now leading supply chain security for a 130-member industry consortium. His verdict: the infrastructure isn’t keeping up.In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Ryan explains why GLP-1 demand and the rise of direct-to-consumer platforms such as TrumpRX have become the stress test pharma’s supply chain never prepared for—and what manufacturers need to do before the system breaks.

"Sponsors don't want to know how many SOPs you have on the shelf. They're really looking to see if you have sound judgment to take care of their program." Mohamad Ahmad, Vice President of Quality and Compliance at the Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) Inc., brings extensive quality leadership experience across the pharmaceutical industry. The BMC is a Canadian non-profit CDMO established in response to Canada’s effort to strengthen domestic biologics manufacturing capacity following the pandemic. There, Mohamad oversees quality systems across all biologics manufacturing operations, from early clinical through commercial scale.In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Mohamad explains why a risk-based, science-driven approach to quality is the defining factor that separates strong CDMO partners from the rest — and how the BMC has built its quality organization to deliver that across every stage of a program's lifecycle.Read more.

“The level of comfort with AI use in this space is pretty low right now.” Mike Boyson’s observation cuts to the heart of pharma’s AI dilemma. Hesitation is justified—but it shouldn’t paralyze action. His answer: build practical, compliant digital twins that operators can create in Claude without waiting for IT.Mike is a supply chain and pharmaceutical operations leader with over 20 years of experience spanning CMC strategy, external manufacturing, and digital transformation. He spent more than a decade at Takeda leading oncology and biologics supply chain operations, served as Executive Director of Value Chain Leadership at Moderna, and now advises organizations at Azure Biopharma Consulting on adopting AI-driven solutions.In a recent PharmaSource podcast episode, Mike shares concrete use cases for digital twins, explains how to build them without deep technical expertise, and addresses the GXP compliance, data confidentiality, and human-centered challenges that will define pharma AI adoption.Watch the video to accompany this episode here

“Drug candidates that previously would not have been considered feasible — they’re now on the table. Hybrid synthesis is opening the door to peptide drugs you’re going to need in larger quantities.” Brian Gregg, CEO of AmbioPharm, has spent his career in the peptide contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) industry — including early work on exenatide, the first approved GLP-1 receptor agonist for Type 2 diabetes. Today, he leads AmbioPharm through a period of significant strategic expansion, anchored by a differentiated capability: hybrid peptide synthesis.In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Brian explains why hybrid synthesis is rapidly becoming the defining manufacturing advantage in the GLP-1 era, how AmbioPharm is building mirror-image facilities in Shanghai and South Carolina to de-risk customer supply chains, and why the company’s dual-continent footprint is an asset.Read more.

“Our on-time-in-full delivery was 30%. In the beer industry, it’s around 99%. That was a big shock.”When Gijs Vissers joined the pharmaceutical industry, he saw that supply chain operations were often driven by fragmented processes, minimal performance tracking, and cost-focused supplier relationships that created more problems than solutions. Drawing on lessons from the beer industry, where on-time-in-full delivery routinely exceeds 99%, Gijs has spent years transforming pharmaceutical supply chain approaches, achieving employee engagement scores above 80% while dramatically improving supply reliability.Gijs Vissers, Head of Supply Chain and Procurement at Nordic Pharma, brings over 20 years of supply chain and procurement experience across fast-moving consumer goods, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals, including senior roles at Heineken, Bavaria, and DSM before joining Nordic Pharma as Head of Supply Chain and Procurement. His career trajectory reflects a deliberate shift from commercial functions to operational excellence, driven by his Lean Six Sigma training and a conviction that the industry’s greatest asset is its people, not its processes.In this episode, Gijs shared his approach to rebuilding pharmaceutical supply chains from the ground up, moving from reactive vendor management to strategic CDMO partnerships anchored in transparency, long-term forecasting, and patient-centric objectives.Read more.

“CDMOs and Biotechs will both die,” warns NKILT Therapeutics CEO as he talks candidly about the funding crisis stalling cell therapy development, predicting widespread consolidation across biotechs and CDMOs unless the industry shifts toward risk-sharing partnership models that align manufacturing economics with capital constraints.Raphaël Ognar, CEO and co-founder of NKILT Therapeutics, brings 29 years of pharmaceutical and biotech experience spanning marketing, drug development, and corporate strategy at major pharmaceutical companies. After launching a consulting practice focused on early-stage immuno-oncology biotechs, Raphaël co-founded NKILT Therapeutics.NKILT’s off-the-shelf allogeneic approach (as opposed to patient-specific autologous therapies) targets HLA-G, an immunosuppressive molecule expressed across major cancer types including colorectal, breast, prostate, and kidney cancers, providing access to substantially larger patient populations while improving manufacturing scalability and economics.His company’s 12-month IND delay exemplifies the systemic pressures that continue to threaten cell therapy innovation, and both sides of the CDMO-biotech relationship.Read more.

"A high-level Pfizer manager went on record and said: if they had to choose between lowering prices in the US or not launching in France — they would not launch in France."Christoffer Frendesen, EU correspondent for Dagens Pharma and former European Parliament policy advisor, raises serious concerns about a policy shock that many in Brussels are still reluctant to confront directly.Christoffer covers health, pharma, and life sciences policy from Brussels, with over five years of experience as a policy advisor to Danish MEPs inside the European Parliament. His close proximity to both legislative process and industry reaction gives him a well-informed perspective on the real-world consequences of US drug pricing reform on European markets.In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Christoffer explains why Trump's Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) executive order, signed in May 2025, is not just an American story, and why pharmaceutical executives, market access teams, and patient advocates across Europe need to be paying close attention right now.Read more.