What are “3 Key Trends” shaping the CDMO industry in 2023 and beyond? Adare Pharma Solutions’ senior director of pharmaceutical sciences, business support, and new technologies, Srinivasan Shanmugam, shares his thoughts with Contract Pharma.

Patient-centric dosage forms for special patient populations
Ensuring adherence to a prescribed therapeutic regimen is a major hurdle in managing acute or chronic conditions. Non-adherence not only burdens the healthcare system, patients, and caregivers, but it also undermines the safety and efficacy of the treatment, resulting in suboptimal therapeutic outcomes. Though adherence can be difficult for any patient, it’s a particular challenge for special patient populations like pediatric and geriatric patients. For example, a medication’s convenience, swallowability, and taste can significantly impact the patient’s acceptance and adherence to therapeutic regimens.

Technologies that can create patient-centric dosage forms can help address these issues by making a medication more convenient, easier to swallow, and palatable. Adare’s technologies provide customizable drug release profiles while effectively masking the unpleasant and bitter tastes of API. Our technology platforms generate microparticles that can be integrated into patient-friendly dosage forms tailored to patients’ needs, including powder for liquid suspension, ODT, chewable, dispersible, or powder forms for ease of administration and improved adherence.

High potency drugs
Highly potent drugs have a strong effect at low concentrations compared to other drugs. While this means they can be more effective, they are also often more toxic and require additional safety measures, including containments, during manufacturing to protect employees and the environment from exposure. The demand for highly potent drugs has been growing rapidly, with 25% of new drugs falling under this category, due in part to the increasing focus on specialized disease areas such as oncology and infection that require higher potency drugs.

In response to this trend, companies like Adare are expanding their high potency drug development and manufacturing capabilities to produce novel therapies in areas like oncology. Adare’s Optimμm technology is a great fit for low dose and high potent drugs for oral administration.

Complex and novel therapies
In recent years, one of the most important stories in medicine has been the exciting growth in sophisticated therapies that help treat diseases in innovative ways previously impossible, including cell and gene therapies, mRNA therapies, and new cancer therapies.

Although these therapies have proven to be more effective, their complexity has made their development and manufacturing significantly more challenging. As a result, CDMOs are crucial in supporting the production of these therapies.

Moving forward, one of the primary objectives for everyone in the CDMO space will be acquiring the capabilities and expertise needed to meet the demands of these new therapies. Stratum, Adare’s long-acting injectable technology, is specially designed and developed to accommodate these kinds of novel therapeutic molecules to improve compliance, reduce drug level variation, and make treatment more convenient for patients. Thus, at Adare, we’re actively investing in technological advancements so that we can continue to aid our customers’ entire development and manufacturing portfolio, regardless of complexity.