Pharmaceutical Technology® spoke with Martin Meeson, CEO of Axplora, about the role contract development and manufacturing organizations have in ensuring the quality of APIs and the security of the supply chain.
Contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) can offer services across different modalities and, often, across different regions, according to Martin Meeson, CEO of Axplora. CDMOs also audit their ingredient suppliers to ensure quality. These services can help ensure API quality, thereby helping to secure the supply chain.
“We look to [our suppliers] for the same commitment to quality that we have. In order to apply that across the supply chain, we have to have a structure like this, because you have to be quite agile in the industry that we've got. We're all people [who] want speed, reliability, and quality built in,” Meeson says. “But we have to find a way to have a supply chain that's robust and can operate with a little bit of agility to make sure that we can get the medicines through to the patients that we supply. I think [being science based] is a really important part of underlying quality. It is a very technical piece of operation we do to have that level of science embedded.”
Meeson recommends that pharmaceutical companies partner with companies that have quality embedded into their operations. “It's not something that we turn off; it's absolutely embedded in everything that we do, in every piece of day-to-day operation. It's absolutely the heart of what we do every day,” Meeson says. “This is exactly what [pharma companies] should be looking for, because that ensures the robustness of the supply of the medicines that we are making for the patients that are out there.”
Click the video above to watch the interview.
Get the essential updates shaping the future of pharma manufacturing and compliance—subscribe today to Pharmaceutical Technology and never miss a breakthrough.
A Novel, Enhanced, and Sustainable Approach to Audit Trail Review
July 4th 2025Eli Lilly and Company developed an innovative and sustainable approach to audit trail review (ATR) aimed at reducing the ATR burden while adhering to regulatory expectations and data integrity (DI) principles. The process has transformed employees' understanding of ATR and complemented the DI by design approach, leading to better system designs that meet expected controls and reduce non-value-added data reviews.