CPHI Americas 2025 Insider Insights with Thermo Fisher Scientific

While CPHI Americas 2025 has wrapped, the learnings from on-site don’t stop. From exclusive interviews with leading industry experts, we bring you our Insider Insights from the Philadelphia show floor.

1. What have been some of your highlights at CPHI Americas 2025?

It’s always good to see our customers and get our feel for where we are in the relationship and how we can better collaborate. CPHI Americas is a great place to meet face-to-face and be more personal than online. It’s nice to see how other companies are advancing their technologies, equipment, or services and setting a benchmark for us to see if we are keeping up with our competitors. Are our competitors offering anything new and exciting? It’s great to walk the floor and see what services others are offering and highlighting, which might reflect what the marketplace is wanting or needing. When you come to an event, you can get a better feel for market dynamics and trends, alongside your own ideas of what to strive towards.

2. How do you determine what those emerging dynamics are when coming to events like CPHI Americas?

Talking to people and asking questions can help you determine what customers are curious, nervous, or excited about and what they are looking for as solutions. I did get to walk the floor and chat with some people to determine these dynamics, scheduling a lot of meetings and ad-hoc meetings with past and present colleagues.

3. Thermo Fisher Scientific are this year’s Track Sponsors for our Bio-Innovation track. How are Thermo Fisher driving innovation in biomanufacturing and bioproduction?

We launched a new platform called Accelerator Drug Development, which minimises timelines in drug development and biologics molecules. What used to be 13 or 14 months has been reduced to 9 months, which is among the fastest in the industry. We’re really working on timelines from the start to finish of a drug substance for such products as mAbs. We have also invested in providing single-use reactors on a large scale with a shortened timeline, and integrating this with our other services.

Specifically for Thermo, we are also growing our sterile network because this is what the market has been demanding such as in pre-filled injectables that have been a hot ticket item for the past several years, with at-home deliveries and patient-centric formats. We have all of our sites expanding, and creating new sites in places like Massachusetts, to bring more manufacturing to the US. At the end of last year, we announced that we are converting one of our viral-vector sites to steriles. We’ve had autoinjector assembly and such services in our global network for many years but we are now moving to streamlining the manufacturing of these products seamlessly. We now have two manufacturing sites in the US and hopefully more to come. The need for steriles is out there – we cannot build them fast enough!

4. There has been a lot of buzz around Thermo Fisher’s partnership with RoosterBio. Could you give some insight into what that partnership will entail?

While I can’t give too much detail on it, I do know they are looking to leverage RoosterBio as a true partner – in the past, partnerships have been more transactional. Customers will come to CDMOs/CROs saying ‘I have this product, I just need the hands and the GMP facilities to make it’. Now, our customers are coming to us looking for a true partnership and collaborative spirit rather than just ‘can we use your tech’. RoosterBio and Thermo Fisher will be a true partnership – we’re helping each other to solve problems and helping each other to be better. It advances the medicines that they have and their technologies, but also helps us to learn from our customers at the same time. This is one of the best parts of the CDMO spaces – we have so many different things going on at once but we’re always learning and applying what we learn to whatever we are currently working on. The reason why we can do this Accelerator 360 approach is because of our years of experience. We know where the problems are and where issues lie, and we can then take a risk-based approach to streamline processes.

5. How do events like CPHI Americas help the pharmaceutical industry highlight these topics?

The nice thing about events like this is that it is quite local – most people I’ve spoken with haven’t come farther than a 2-3 hour flight. While there are people that have come from around the world, it is definitely more of a local feeling at the event for our colleagues and customers. We’ll see at CPHI Worldwide what that feeling is in October, but CPHI Americas is definitely the place to be for the pharmaceutical supply chain in the Americas specifically.