Lonza Names Samanta Cimitan Chief Commercial Officer

Lonza, a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), has appointed Samanta Cimitan as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), Senior Vice President and Member of the Extended Executive Committee, effective January 2027.

In this newly created role, Cimitan will lead Strategic Enterprise Account Management, Global Marketing and Commercial Excellence. She will hold direct commercial responsibility for Lonza’s strategic accounts and through Commercial Excellence and Global Marketing help shape a unified go-to-market approach across One Lonza. In line with the One Lonza strategy, the role is designed to make it easy for customers to engage with, access and navigate Lonza’s full end-to-end offering globally and across all three Business Platforms.

Wolfgang Wienand, CEO, Lonza, said, “Samanta brings deep CDMO expertise, commercial leadership experience and first-hand knowledge of Lonza. She understands what it takes to build trusted partnerships, execute with commercial discipline and create value across the full development and manufacturing journey. I am very pleased to welcome Samanta back to Lonza as we continue to sharpen our commercial focus and deliver on our purpose of making the medicines of tomorrow.”

Experience

Cimitan brings extensive business leadership experience across the CDMO industry, with a strong track record in commercial strategy, customer partnership development and operational execution. She currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of the Celonic Group, where she has led the company’s evolution into a focused biologics CDMO and strengthened its commercial, operational, regulatory and innovation capabilities.

Prior to Celonic, Cimitan spent almost 13 years at Lonza in commercial and strategy leadership roles, including as Vice President of Lonza Group Operations Strategy, where she developed and led transformation programs spanning Commercial, R&D and Operations.