‘The CDMO industry is not going away’
“Across the board, the CDMO industry has noticed the difference in the economy. There is a tightening of finances and companies are postponing clinical trials as they maybe focus on some of their later stage molecules,” Brittany Hayes, highly potent platform director at CordenPharma, tells BioPharma Reporter at CPHI Barcelona 2023.
During the pandemic, the Switzerland-based drugmaker thrived under its partnership with Moderna, to supply large volumes of liquid excipients for the pharma giant’s Covid-19 vaccine.
While Hayes admits demand has slowed as the pandemic has waned, the CDMO has maintained this relationship, as well as filling its pipeline with a number of customers that have progressed and are moving into commercial materials.
“Our lipids offering is very strong because we still work with Moderna and others are now expanding in this area. Our peptide platform is also going crazy. At our injectable site, we work on lipid nanoparticle formulation development and manufacturing so now we can actually help our customers make those different vaccines.”
As Hayes mentions, the company’s peptide platform is performing particularly well. In fact, while CordenPharma has yet to officially comment on its latest major deal, Reuters recently reported that Eli Lilly had hired the CDMO to make the active ingredient in its blockbuster weight loss drug Mounjaro.
According to Reuters, its source revealed that CordenPharma’s facility in Colorado is under contract to produce tirzepatide, the active ingredient in the weekly injection.
Back in January, the CDMO said it had signed a multi-year agreement commencing in 2023 for the contract manufacturing of a large volume peptide at its Colorado facility, potentially to the value of $1 billion. The company also revealed it had completed the upgrade and expansion of this site, as well as recruiting more staff, following the January deal.
The news comes after industry experts have recognised the potential of the obesity drugs market for CDMOs, especially in the post-pandemic lull.
“I think the GLP-1 need is probably similar to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is the time for us as an industry to step up and show what we can do about it. We must show what we can deliver in terms of science, speed, reliability of supply and security of supply,” Sylke Hassel, CEO of Axplora, recently commented at the Jefferies Healthcare Conference.
For Hayes, CordenPharma’s resilience is largely due to the fact that the company is not reliant on one specific area and has over 6 technology platforms.
“Our variety helps us a lot – especially in more difficult times. That is a strength of CordenPharma and differentiates us from our competitors that we have these different technologies,” she says.
The company’s platforms include peptides, oligonucleotides, lipids & carbohydrates, injectables, highly potent & oncology and small molecules.
In addition, the decision to re-enter the oligonucleotide market, Hayes explains, was a strategic decision as it helps to complete CordenPharma’s full service CDMO offerings for customers – spanning the entire product lifecycle.
“We cover the entire drug development pipeline from very early phase 1 clinical trials all the way through commercialization,” she says.
Highly potent & oncology, the platform Hayes oversees, has over 30 years of experience in handling high potent active ingredients in both API manufacturing and drug product manufacturing.
“At the sites that handle high potent active ingredients, we have all the engineering and containment required to be able to safely handle those all the way down to very sub-nanogram application or exposure,” she adds.
“There aren’t that many people that can handle some of the most toxic, high potent substances on this planet. We can contain down to the picogram, nanogram levels and there aren’t that many companies that can actually deal with that.”
Despite recent challenges, Hayes maintains that the CDMO industry is not going away, as ‘there are so many people that rely on this industry to manufacture materials’.
“Moving forward, we must consider how we get through the rough spots as we get out of this period of financial difficulty and there is more money available for biotechs,” she says.