What are “3 Key Trends” shaping the CDMO industry in 2023 and beyond? Aton Biotech’s chief business officer, Min Park, shares his thoughts with Contract Pharma.

Traditional fee for service vs. strategic partnership
One of the key trends we are noticing is the interest in a more creative and flexible partnership model. CDMOs are becoming more risk adverse and moving toward a traditional fee for service model. Innovators face enormous challenges, and it is becoming more work for them to find their partner of choice. At Aton Biotech, we have extensive experience with over 500 commercial batches produced and with full drug substance and drug product capabilities our innovators can leverage as they see fit. We listen to our customers and establish creative solutions to become a strategic partner of choice. We enable our strategic partners to accelerate progress to market, mitigate risk, leverage our superior platforms, and ultimately provide flexibility to become an extension of their organization.

True end-to-end integrated value stream
There are over 400 CDMOs globally with many suppliers claiming end-to-end service offering. We all recognize not all CDMOs are the same and all of us have our own unique value proposition. Innovators are faced with massive pressure such as growing supply chain complexity from supply shortages to vetting more CDMOs than ever before. At Aton Biotech, we partner up with our customers to be able to share our end-to-end integrated solution to support any stage from drug discovery to commercialization, including fill-finish capabilities with flexible options. A true integrated, end-to-end partner can be more flexible, help mitigate risk, manage timelines better, and reduce overall cost.

Demand for fill-finish capabilities and capacity
The demand for biopharmaceutical pipelines are becoming increasingly diverse with new modalities and delivery technologies driving up the demand for fill-finish capacity across the CDMO sector. Out of over 400 CDMOs globally, there is only a small portion that have fully integrated, full drug product capabilities to meet the growing demand. From conventional monoclonal antibodies, fusion proteins, bispecifics, ADCs, enzymes, and other next-generation antibody-based products such as cell and gene therapies, all have demand for a fill-finish capable CDMO. In addition to the demand, finding a qualified and experienced fill-finish CDMO partner will be a growing challenge. At Aton Biotech, we have extensive experience with over 500 commercial batches produced with integrated drug substance to drug product capabilities to leverage our fill-finish experience.