How many of you remember the late 90s? It was a time of great excitement during which huge growth rates in custom manufacturing were predicted. Most pharmaceutical companies were only thinking about launching new blockbusters and investing heavily in research to accelerate development of their pipelines. For those of us there at that time it was the dawn of a new age in which for the first time it was even speculated that Pharma would focus more on its core competencies of product development and marketing whilst at the same time reducing its manufacturing activities for which it would turn more and more to external CMOs?
Today, we know that not all of this came true. The heavy investment in pipeline development has failed to fully deliver the high expectations in predicted new sales growth. At the same time we are very well aware of the enormous losses of pharmaceutical sales due to the patent cliff which has catalysed significant downsizing and restructuring fuelled by high M&A activity. In the last 5 to 10 years we have grown accustomed to the low numbers of approvals of new chemical entities coupled with a dramatic switch towards biologics which are now predicted to d ...