Contract manufacturing came forward

Abstract

Regulators and the public alike learned a lot about the arcane mechanisms of the pharmaceutical supply chain in 2020 as the world monitored the development of therapies and vaccines that might bring life back to normal. A key discovery: outsourcing does not always mean offshoring. Far from it. Production costs have pushed generic-drug manufacturing to low-cost Asia over the last 20 years, but drugmakers have also increased their reliance on drug-ingredient firms close to home for their more cutting-edge therapies. A group of US and European pharmaceutical chemical companies has evolved since the 1990s into a full-service industry, now global, offering development and manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), finished-dose drug production, and new technologies like cell and gene therapy. These contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) have acquired customers’ plants as big pharma gravitates toward exiting large-scale manufacturing. CDMOs also provide essential services to the small biotech ventures at