DCAT 2025 insights and learnings with Thermo Fisher Scientific

DCAT Week 2025, held March 17-20, 2025 in New York City, provides an opportunity for the global bio/pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain to come together and discuss the emerging trends and opportunities in the manufacturing supply chain.

1. What were some of the biggest points of discussion for the outsourcing sector and service providers at DCAT 2025?

It was another excellent networking meeting. As always, DCAT does a great job bringing together sponsors from the industry, our partners in the CDMO space, and vendors, as well as experts from different areas ranging from drug substance manufacturing to drug product manufacturing, clinical packaging, labelling, and all services including clinical services. It was great to get updates from various partners about what they are invested in. There is a lot still to be learned in terms of where the industry is going and how we’re all progressing, all with the same aim to bring essential and important medicines to patients faster.

2. Last year at CPHI Milan, Thermo Fisher unveiled Accelerator Drug Development– how are service providers continuing to work with pharma companies to meet production demand?

This was the same message we brought to DCAT – stressing the importance and the benefits of Accelerator™ Drug Development, our 360-degree CDMO and CRO solutions, to help speed up and simplify the complex journey of a drug product through discovery and development. We met with a number of our existing and prospective partners to discuss this service offering, where Thermo Fisher Scientific is uniquely positioned to provide true end-to-end solutions from drug substance manufacturing through drug product manufacturing, clinical trials, packaging, labelling, distribution, and clinical services.

We are leveraging all the expertise in each and every branch of drug development to bring these medicines to approval through various agencies and to patients faster, which also benefits our global network thanks to our local access in a variety of locations and regions we support. Whether our partners want to manufacture a drug substance in one region, or are planning their clinical trials in a completely different region – we’ve had clients conducting clinical trials in Australia and in Latin America – we can help coordinate all these logistics to make sure our customers have the speed, agility, and flexibility necessary to get the clinical trials and required documentation sent to the regions where they plan to launch and get approval, all so that these essential medicines reach patients faster.

3. What challenges were addressed for both pharma companies and pharma service providers at DCAT this year?

I think the big question here is how do we manage a changing environment and changing scenarios, and how are we addressing those needs – whether that’s driven by capacity, sustainability or other considerations. How are we all going to make sure drugs are developed in a timely manner? We are all in this together to address these questions – sponsors, CDMOs, and every partner in the journey has to be aligned to bring those benefits of speed and flexibility.

4. What were some of your biggest takeaways from DCAT 2025?

A lot of discussions on the benefits of a single vendor approach were addressed as part of Thermo Fisher’s offerings. How can we pool the expertise across all modalities, whether it’s a small molecule, large molecule, or other advanced therapeutic, cell and gene therapies, etc.? What will we see in the coming years and in the short-/mid-/long-term? What are the learnings from those past and current scenarios and where do we see the industry growing in terms of investments and where the demands are coming from? These were things to take away from various presentations and discussions at DCAT.

5. What will be some of the biggest areas of focus for pharma and pharmaceutical service providers in the coming years?

From a CDMO perspective, Thermo Fisher will continue to focus on listening to our partners and investing in discussions with them, when there is a request for adding capabilities or capacities. With all that in mind, we can say for certain that we have already planned investments in the areas of biologics and biologic drug substances. We have made announcements on adding bioreactors at our sites to meet the demands for biology drug substances, and we have invested in small molecule drug production sites as well. We have also added specific equipment and infrastructure to support the growing demands for oral solid dose drug product development at our sites in Bend, Oregon and Cincinnati, Ohio, and other sites as well. These are just a couple of examples where we have focused on the growing demands and needs to help bring speed, flexibility, and timely support as a leading CDMO to sponsor companies.

6. Any further thoughts on DCAT?

These events certainly provide an opportunity to learn from each other and plan where to grow together, as well as understand the whole industry – what are the challenges being faced? What are the newest modalities? What are the success stories and what are the learnings that we all need to factor in from a strategic perspective for the next 3-5 years, and beyond?