What are “3 Key Trends” shaping the CDMO industry in 2024 and beyond? Terumo Blood and Cell Technologies’ senior vice president of R&D, Jackie Kunzler, shares her thoughts with Contract Pharma.

Consolidation of the service industry
Since the boom of the cell and gene therapy (CGT) space, a large number of CDMO players entered the industry to satisfy the needs of the CGT innovators. With increased cost of capital in 2023 and possibly a good part of 2024, the smaller players will be looking for investments from bigger players. The signs were visible in 2023 with the latest acquisition of Forge biologics by Ajinomoto.

Slowdown in infrastructure build and increase in capability spend
In the last few years, we have seen an exponential growth in the space with new facilities and infrastructure being built. The CDMO industry is catching up to the capacity. In 2024 the CDMO industry should be focusing on bringing new and innovative, closed, automated, and flexible technologies to support multiple applications. It should provide better scalability options to the CGT developers. Bioreactor technologies that can support automation of tedious tasks such as cell culture will play a crucial part in the next phase of industry evolution.

Continue to mitigate supply chain risk
In the post-COVID era, companies have started to put plans in place to mitigate supply chain risk. One of the tools is to regionalize manufacturing of cell therapies. CDMOs will play a critical role in the enablement of regionalized manufacturing. Standardized manufacturing methods monitored by sensing technologies will be utilized by the industry at a greater pace. Automated and closed systems will be in increased demand.