There’s no shortage of CDMOs trying to move up the value chain. Fewer are doing it from inside an established pharmaceutical company.

That’s the lane Lupin Limited is trying to carve out with its contract arm, Lupin Manufacturing Solutions (LMS)—a relatively new entity built on top of decades of internal manufacturing infrastructure but now pointed outward.

Leading that effort is CEO Dr. Abdelaziz Toumi, a longtime CDMO executive with more than two decades of experience across pharma, biotech, and manufacturing operations. A chemical engineer by training—with a doctorate from the University of Dortmund and a background shaped by process engineering and Six Sigma—Toumi was brought in to build LMS from the ground up as a more science-driven, client-facing organization.

The idea sounds simple. Take the chemistry, scale, and regulatory backbone of a global generics player and offer it to the broader market. In practice, it’s not that easy. It requires not just new capabilities, but a shift in mindset—from making products for yourself to delivering services for someone else.

That’s where Toumi has been focused since stepping into the role.

From Product Company to Service Mindset

Toumi didn’t come up through the CDMO ranks.

A chemical engineer by training, he spent years at Merck KGaA and later Lonza, seeing the outsourcing model from both sides. That perspective shows up quickly when he talks about what LMS is trying to build—and what still needs to change internally.

“The biggest difference is the mindset,” he says, in so many words. “When you’re a product company, you manufacture for yourself. You don’t have customers walking your site. You don’t think about service the same way.”

That shift—from internal manufacturing to external service—isn’t trivial. It touches everything from how teams interact with clients to how facilities present themselves.

“You’re not just delivering a product anymore,” he says. “You’re being evaluated on how you do it.”

In other words, customer experience suddenly matters as much as output.

That’s required LMS to build capabilities Lupin didn’t historically need—commercial teams, program management, client communication structures. It also meant recruiting externally to bring in CDMO experience that didn’t exist in-house.

Leveraging What’s Already There

What LMS does have—arguably its biggest advantage—is access.

Unlike standalone CDMOs, LMS sits inside a company that already runs large-scale manufacturing operations across both drug substance and drug product. That creates flexibility most API-focused players don’t have.

“If a client comes to us for drug product, we can support that through the broader Lupin network,” Toumi explains. “That opens the door. Then over time, you build the relationship.”

That approach is less about one-off transactions and more about entry points.

It also ties into a broader operational reality: unused capacity.

Like many manufacturers, Lupin doesn’t run every facility at full utilization. LMS is designed, in part, to monetize that gap—bringing in external projects to improve asset efficiency while lowering overall cost of goods.

“It’s good for the client, it’s good for us, and it’s good for the group,” Toumi says. “You’re making better use of what you already have.”

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Moving Beyond Commodity APIs

Still, LMS isn’t positioning itself as just another API supplier.

If anything, Toumi is explicit about wanting to move away from that perception.

“We don’t want to be seen as a low-value, volume player,” he says. “The goal is to move from volume to value.”

That strategy is showing up in where LMS is investing:

• Peptides, particularly as demand grows around GLP-1s and other complex therapies

• Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), including high-potent payload and linker capabilities

• High-potent APIs (HPAPIs), supported by existing infrastructure

The peptide push is already taking shape through a partnership with PolyPeptide Group, aimed at supplying critical building blocks for large-scale peptide manufacturing.

It’s a deliberate move into areas where technical barriers are higher, competition is thinner (especially in India), and customers are actively looking to diversify supply chains away from China.

“There’s a real opportunity there,” Toumi says, pointing to geopolitical pressures and the need for dual sourcing. “People don’t want to rely on one region anymore.”

A Changing CDMO Model

Zooming out, LMS is entering a CDMO market that looks very different from even a decade ago.

The transactional model—make a batch, send an invoice, move on—is fading. In its place is something more integrated, more collaborative, and frankly, more complicated.

“It’s not ‘can you make this for me,'” Toumi says. “It’s ‘where are you going, and how do we get there together?'”

That shift is being driven by several forces:

• Increased pipeline complexity, especially in biologics and advanced modalities

• Higher regulatory expectations, particularly around CMC and quality systems

• Supply chain risk, exposed during the pandemic and still being addressed

• ESG pressures, especially from European and U.S. sponsors

The result is a model that looks less like vendor-client and more like embedded partnership.

In some cases, Toumi says, it becomes hard to tell where one company ends and the other begins.

“You walk into a room, and you don’t know who works for which company,” he says. “That’s when it’s working.”

Capacity, Risk, and the “Restaurant” Model

One of the more telling ways Toumi frames the CDMO business is through a simple analogy.

“You don’t go to a restaurant and wait a week for a table,” he says. “You expect it to be ready.”

That’s essentially the CDMO model: build capacity ahead of demand, take on risk, and fill it with a mix of clients.

For sponsors, it’s a way to avoid heavy capital investment in manufacturing. For CDMOs, it’s a balancing act—managing pipelines, forecasting demand, and ensuring facilities don’t sit idle.

It’s also what made the model indispensable during COVID-19.

“Without CDMOs, we wouldn’t have had the capacity to produce vaccines at the speed we did,” Toumi says.

That moment didn’t just validate the model—it accelerated its evolution.

The Bigger Challenge Ahead

If there’s a through line in Toumi’s view of the industry, it’s that complexity isn’t going away.

If anything, it’s increasing—across molecules, supply chains, and organizational structures.

“There are so many variables,” he says. “It’s almost a miracle sometimes that medicines get made.”

That complexity is pushing CDMOs—and companies like LMS—to think more broadly about their role. Not just as manufacturers, but as part of a larger ecosystem that includes technology providers, suppliers, regulators, and sponsors.

It also raises the stakes internally.

Building a CDMO isn’t just about assets. It’s about culture—empowering teams, improving retention, and creating an environment where people can operate with a degree of autonomy.

“You can’t run this like a traditional hierarchy,” Toumi says. “People need to make decisions.”

Building Toward What’s Next

LMS is still early in that journey.

The platform is only a few years old in its current form, and much of the organizational buildout—from leadership to commercial structure—is still relatively fresh.

For now, the focus is immediate: build the pipeline, establish credibility, and prove that a CDMO born inside a pharma company can compete with more established players.

It’s a crowded market. But it’s also one still evolving.

And for LMS, that may be the opening.