PharmaSource Podcast

“No one is going to care about your project as much as you do.” 
Steven Weissman is Vice President and Head of CMC at Cognition Therapeutics, a small pharma company outside New York City developing CT1812, a neurodegeneration candidate now through three Phase 2 trials in Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, and dry AMD. He spent 18 years in the process chemistry groups at Merck before moving into the small pharma space, where he has managed CMC functions at Concert Pharmaceuticals, Lexicon, and now Cognition Therapeutics.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast, Steven explains how small biotechs can build a manufacturing supply chain from scratch, why cost of goods is a lever most teams pull too late, and what working on drugs that made it to market, and some that didn’t, taught him about when to invest in process development.
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“Digital collaboration is a competitive advantage for everyone — for CDMOs and CMOs, it’s not a question of if you’re going to do it, it’s when. So how do you get ready for it?”
At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Sham Afzalpurkar, CEO of Collabrix, presented a standards-based, AI-enabled framework for connecting sponsor-CDMO networks at scale, arguing that custom point-to-point integrations are structurally unsustainable as external manufacturing portfolios grow.
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“When we go to an external partner, we need to show up as one single aligned organization. If we’re not aligned internally, the CMO ends up becoming the referee.”
In pharmaceutical manufacturing, the quality of a CDMO partnership is rarely determined by the contract alone. According to Sabrina Mattos, Senior Director of External Manufacturing for the Americas at Elanco, what truly separates high-performing partnerships from dysfunctional ones comes down to two factors: internal alignment and cultural intelligence.
Sabrina brings over 20 years of pharmaceutical industry experience spanning quality, supply chain, and operations leadership across Brazil, Europe, and North America. As a pharmacist who began her career as a QA representative at Eli Lilly in Brazil, she has progressed through site leadership and global roles to now oversee Elanco’s external manufacturing portfolio across the US, Canada, and Latin America — a hub spanning close to 50 CMO relationships.
In a recent PharmaSource Podcast conversation, Sabrina shared how Elanco structures its external manufacturing teams, navigates the cultural differences that shape partnerships across the Americas, and why getting internal alignment right before approaching a CDMO is non-negotiable.
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At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Jeff Mason, VP and Head of US Sales at Samsung Biologics, demonstrated a risk-based, parallel approach to dual-site technology transfer that delivered a first GMP batch at a second facility within 90 days of initiation.
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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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