CPHI Americas 2025: A Growing Service Offering
In this interview with The Pharma Navigator, Dan Dobry from Bend Bioscience chats about the value of comprehensive end-to-end services, challenges and future trends for OSD CDMOs, and the company’s focus for this year’s CPHI Americas event.
CDMOs represent a key support to many companies within the bio/pharmaceutical industry, providing a variety of services throughout the full drug lifecycle — from research and development all the way to commercialization. The connection between bio/pharma companies and service providers has evolved over the years from an occasional provider of services into what is now considered more of a strategic relationship where there is greater reliance on the CDMO (1).
The type of company seeking out strategic partnerships for their development and manufacturing needs has also broadened and now incorporates smaller innovators in addition to Big Pharma (2). Added to this trend, the advancing development pipeline with increasingly complex molecules under investigation is further compounding the need for CDMOs to have comprehensive capabilities and extensive expertise while also being agile.
To learn more about comprehensive services, the challenges facing oral solid dose (OSD) innovators, and potential future trends for OSD CDMOs, as well as more details about the upcoming CPHI Americas event, The Pharma Navigator spoke with Dan Dobry, Chief Strategy Officer, Bend Bioscience.
Investing in Success
TPN: What are comprehensive end-to-end services and how do these services benefit innovators/sponsor companies?
Dobry: First, let’s address the ‘comprehensive’ aspect of this through the lens of breadth of capabilities offered. Comprehensive services allow access to a wide range of enabling paths forward with one team, ability to adapt and apply alternative approaches based on learnings in program, and if necessary, the ability to innovate new solutions to challenging drug delivery statements.
Second, lets address the end-to-end aspect. When working with a CDMO who can offer support of your program from formulation design, through product development and onto commercial supply, innovator or sponsor companies benefit from a true partner who is invested in the successful ongoing development, and ultimately the supply of the product for patients. In essence, we are unified in the sponsors mission to see the project through to successful launch. I believe this results in both a higher probability of success and an optimal path from design to launch and supply.
A Requirement for Agility
TPN: As a specialist partner in OSD forms, what have been the biggest challenges facing innovators in this field and how have CDMOs had to adapt to be able to overcome these challenges?
Dobry: There are several challenges facing innovators, ranging from the sometimes rapidly evolving political and regulatory landscape, to disruptions caused by the timing of funding and the need to hit milestones, to supply chain uncertainty, and of course to technical and delivery challenges, especially when it comes to emerging new therapeutic targets. In the past, CDMOs have attempted to standardize their offerings in the pursuit of efficiency, and ‘brand’ them as standard packages for marketing. In today’s dynamic environment of constant change and new challenges, CDMOs need to adopt an agile, high science, high service culture where challenges can be addressed with a phase-appropriate balance of speed, quality, and technical risk mitigation, and on top of all that, an overlay of data-driven decision making.
Important Future Topics for OSD CDMOs
TPN: What do you foresee as being important trends for the OSD contract development and manufacturing space over the next 5–10 years?
Dobry: Emerging therapeutic areas such as targeted protein degraders, interest in oral peptides, and continued progress of mRNA-based therapies will drive the need for CDMOs to adopt — and in some cases innovate — new technologies for both their development and manufacture.
While we will strive for platform approaches, each molecule requires customization leading to continued need for model-based tools to speed decisions and reduce risk. This includes both mechanistic understanding (deterministic) models and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to better interpret increasingly large data sets.
Market and supply chain dynamics are on everyone’s minds, and I think we will see innovators targeting both mass market blockbusters (anti-obesity, diabetes) and smaller market therapies (orphan or patient centric care). We can expect to see needs for both large scale redundant global supply and operations focused on decreased scale with increased product diversity.
We foresee an increase in patients’ ownership of their care, as themes such as telemedicine, director-to-consumer marketing, and personalized medicine gain greater adoption and traction, both opportunities and challenges will emerge. How do we capitalize on the advantages of reduced cost and potential improved individual patient outcomes while countering challenges such as misinformation, false marketing, and counterfeiting of life-altering therapies? These will be important topics for the OSD CDMO industry over the next decade.
Connecting with Existing and New Collaborators
TPN: What is Bend most looking forward to at CPHI Americas this year?
Dobry: We are looking forward to catching up with our existing customers and collaborators, and to meeting new ones. With the growth of our service offering across our Bend Bioscience network in Georgia, Florida, and Oregon, we have added several new business development team members who are excited to discuss your problem statements and our breadth of capabilities to address them.
TPN: Can you highlight any specific innovations that Bend will be presenting at the show?
Dobry: In addition to highlighting our industry leading capabilities in enabling formulation development and manufacturing, including bioavailability and absorption enhancement technologies, we are particularly excited to talk about our strategic investments and capability expansion in Gainesville, Georgia, where we’ve added a commercial-scale spray dryer and a Gerteis dry granulation system. Our 120,000-square-foot Georgia facility provides comprehensive clinical and commercial scale oral dose forms, and this expansion allows us to meet the demands of significant near-term growth through our network of capabilities and expertise in enhancing pharmacokinetics, particle engineering, and modified release forms.
TPN: Where can visitors find Bend at CPHI Americas?
Dobry: Come visit Bend Bioscience at booth #1631. We’re excited to be heading to CPHI Americas this year with a fresh look. Since coming together as one team across Bend Bioscience, CoreRx, and Societal CDMO, we’ve updated our branding to better reflect our combined organization — and we’re looking forward to sharing it with the industry.
References
CPHI Online. Global CDMO Trends: The 2024 Outsourcing Forecast. CPHI Online Trend Report, April 9, 2025.
Gonzalez, R. How CDMOs are Leading Innovation for Pharmaceutical Partners. EY-Parthenon, Article, July 14, 2022.
Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash