Building Trusted CDMO Relationships: A CPHI Conversation with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Part Two

In the conclusion of Pharmaceutical Technology®’s conversation with Jennifer Cannon, PhD, president, Commercial Operations, Pharma Services at Thermo Fisher Scientific, at CPHI Frankfurt 2025, the discussion shifts from artificial intelligence (AI)—typified by Thermo Fisher’s recently announced strategic collaboration with OpenAI—to the results yielded by the company’s Accelerator Drug Development platform in its first year of offering the formally integrated contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), contract research organization (CRO), and clinical supply services.

“We're getting to the point where we've got so much experience in doing it that we want to move more toward an outcome-based contracting, where we commit to a certain timeline that is significantly faster than the fragmented supply chain where customers use different vendors throughout their CMC (chemistry, manufacturing, and controls) and clinical trials and testing,” Cannon says in the interview.

This experience, she says, naturally builds trust between Thermo Fisher and its partners.

“Just speaking about the development in the manufacturing side, there's going to be bumps in the road, through your development, as you're approaching commercialization,” Cannon says. “You want to work with a partner that's going to help you through those bumps in the road.”

Cannon also spoke about the annual experience of CPHI and how it has evolved over the last decade-plus.

“I've been to CPHI for 13 years, and it was always historically very small-molecule modality-based,” she says. “Now we're seeing a lot more customers, of course, coming in with large-molecule and emerging cell and gene therapies.”

Click here to watch Part One of the interview.

Click here for all of our CPHI Frankfurt coverage.

Transcript

Editor's note: This transcript is a lightly edited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

I am Jennifer Cannon. I head up the commercial organization for Thermo Fisher’s CDMO, contract manufacturing. We call it the Pharma Services group.

We've actually mapped that out. We continue to lean on the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development and Design, and they use our data as well as data that that models out, if we're working with a customer in Phase I or II, they're modeling out, if that molecule continues on, what that benefit will be long-term. And so it's some of their data and our data combined.

For Phase III programs, that's where we see the bigger return on investment, just because the cost of the trial [and] the number of patients involved in the trial is so much more significant. And so the cost and time savings benefit[s are] that much more significant. We're seeing between a 20- [and] 100-fold return on investment. The net present value of these are quite significant. We're getting to the point where we've got so much experience in doing it that we want to move more toward an outcome-based contracting, where we commit to a certain timeline that is significantly faster than the fragmented supply chain where customers use different vendors throughout their CMC (chemistry, manufacturing, and controls) and clinical trials and testing.

When we make that commitment, we're actually providing a guarantee to performance. Imagine if you're a biotech, you have limited funding, you know then that you can advance your IND (investigational new drug) filing, or you can move to your next Phase II or Phase III that much faster. It's a pretty bold commitment that we're making, but it's because we've got enough of these trials under our belt, both on the CMC and the clinical trial side, that we're ready to introduce this in 2026.

Just speaking about the development in the manufacturing side, there's going to be bumps in the road, through your development, as you're approaching commercialization. You want to work with a partner that's going to help you through those bumps in the road. And so as we come to CPHI again, we've built really strong relationships. We've managed through some difficult supply chain issues.

For customers that have been working with us for many years, even pre-COVID, so much has to come together to be ready for commercialization. Might be through the process development status, the procurement of materials, the readiness of the line. Being able to have very open and transparent discussions and using data during it, we use [the] MySupply [platform]—that was something we rolled out about a year and a half ago, which we give our customers full access to. Not many CDMOs will do this. MySupply allows a customer to go in and see, did my batch start filling? Is my batch on track for on-time delivery? Is my batch in full? How does the yield look? If there’s a particular—if it's in the red, if a program's not performing as originally planned between the partner and Thermo Fisher, what actions are we doing, which are on a glide path, and how are those actions being implemented to ensure we get back on track? So we believe a lot in data, and we believe in full transparency to our customers.

We also really appreciate and value when our customers come to our sites and work with us and understand the complexity of what we're delivering together.