Biopharma resilience: Supply chain improving but talent gap grows, Cytiva

Cytiva says capacity investments and more localized production have improved supply chain security though its annual biomanufacturing landscape snapshot shows overall industry resilience is down.

For the third year running, bioprocess vendor Cytiva has published results from its Biopharma Resilience Index, a survey of capabilities in five key areas rated by industry leaders.

Among the reasons to be cheerful, over half the respondents (52%) believe it has become more affordable to manufacture drugs with the manufacturing agility score increasing compared to 2021 when the issue was highlighted by the report.

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The other key positive takeaway is confidence in supply chain resilience, hit particularly hard during the heady days of the pandemic.

Cytiva CEO Emmanuel Ligner said confidence in supply chains has evolved due to rapid actions by vendors to ramp up supply. “The investment that the industry has done in terms of capacity for supply […] we can really see the feedback from the CEOs and the executives [that security is] getting much better,” he told BioProcess Insider’s Millie Nelson at the BPI Theater at BIO this week. “We still have plenty of things to do, but we are on the right trajectory.”

Many vendors expedited numerous CAPEX plans during COVID. Parent company Danaher Corporation underwent capacity expansions at both Cytiva and Pall, including a $500 million multi-pronged investment in September 2020, with a further $1.5 billion boost in July 2021. Peers, including Thermo Fisher, also responded to the industry’s supply needs and many of these projects have now come online.

Ligner also noted many of these projects focused on localized manufacturing units and sustainability, things he said industry is increasingly calling for, and part of the rationale of the recent merger of Cytiva and Pall.

“It’s about really providing better service for the industry and leveraging the two supply chains. It’s deploying capital in the right area of the world, in-region-for-region,” he said.

Talent shortages

But despite manufacturing and supply chain positivity, the overall index score in 2023 was 6.08 out of ten compared to 6.6 in 2021. This was due to a lack of confidence in the R&D ecosystem and a general dissatisfaction with government policy and regulation.

However, continuing challenges surround the talent pool were also highlighted, with the need for increasingly complex and specific skill sets a cause for concern going forward.

There has been a general consensus that the amount of talent coming through is not reflective of the huge investments in capacity being made across the Life Sciences industry, and according to Ligner “it’s getting harder and harder and harder.”

He continued: “It’s a fast-paced industry, and therefore talents need to follow, but also, we have new areas coming in. If we think about the digital aspect, and how much we are investing to make sure that we bring digital tools to the industry – which are going to be really differentiating around speed, around in silico simulation around digital twin of bioprocessing – we need to attract those experts, which are not something that we are used to having in the industry.”