PharmaSource Podcast

When relationships with contract manufacturers break down, the cause is rarely just the contract manufacturer. A panel of three sponsor-side executives examined the warning signs, the internal failures, and the governance models that determine whether a difficult relationship recovers or ends.
At CDMO Live Europe 2026, a session, moderated by Raman Sehgal of the Molecule to Market podcast, brought together three buyers: Stefan Bouckaert, a Quality and Operations Leader who spent 20 years at Johnson & Johnson overseeing 170 contract manufacturing organizations and 5,500 suppliers; Nick Wark, Head of External Manufacturing and Strategic Partnerships at Ferring Pharmaceuticals, overseeing several dozen contract manufacturers; and Oksana Vodovska, Business Development Manager at Sopharma, a regional generics company that selectively outsources alongside its own production facilities.
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“The least expensive CDMO on the first day of bidding may not be the optimum value CDMO three years later.”
Choosing a contract development and manufacturing organization is not about who quotes the lowest unit price. It’s mainly about who keeps your clinical timeline intact.
Prakash Savarirayan is a life sciences procurement leader with more than two decades of sourcing experience, over a dozen years of it in biopharma, including senior roles at Takeda (formerly Shire) and Roche’s Spark Therapeutics. He has led complex CDMO partnerships, supported M&A integrations, and built governance models across small molecules, biologics, and gene therapy, and now advises pharma and biotech clients in consulting capacity.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Prakash explains why getting CDMO selection right matters more than negotiating the lowest price, how procurement earned a strategic seat at the table, and why the right partner protects both patient safety and enterprise value.
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At CDMO Live Europe, Dr. Vijay Vittal Mathad, Chief Operating Officer of CRAMSN Research Park, outlined how a genuine end-to-end CDMO model reduces friction across the drug development lifecycle, from supply chain resilience to sustainability, drawing on 32 years of pharmaceutical development experience.
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Leon Tian, Director of US Project Management, ProBio, walked through the cell line development, high-concentration formulation, and purification workflow, delivering a bispecific antibody tox batch from a single selected clone in 4 to 5 months at CDMO Live Europe 2026.
Speed is always a top priority in biologic CMC development — but most of the time, speed trades against quality or regulatory confidence. What I want to show today is that this trade-off is not necessary.”
ProBio’s client brought a demanding brief: a bispecific antibody project requiring a high-concentration formulation of approximately 120 mg/mL, produced from a single selected clone, with a tox batch delivered in 4 to 5 months. Tian called it a “mission impossible” scenario, then spent the session methodically explaining how ProBio’s platform addresses each part of that challenge.
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“Environmental Sustainability can be a substantial differentiator for CDMOs”
Jürgen Wieland, Development Environmental Sustainability Lead at Novartis, is engaged to integrate sustainability into development processes, including reducing the emissions of clinical trials.  Jürgen brings over 20 years of finance and controlling experience to his sustainability role at Novartis, where he’s responsible for embedding environmental considerations across R&D and clinical operations. Before joining Novartis in 2011, he served as CFO of an NGO bringing solar energy to rural East Africa.
In a recent PharmaSource podcast, Jürgen shares how pharmaceutical companies and their Contract, Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) partners can reduce scope 3 emissions while improving operational efficiency—proving that sustainability and profitability are not mutually exclusive.
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