“Despite the volatility, the industry is getting some positive energy and renewed confidence”
Jeremie Trochu, Chief Executive Officer at Ardena, has spent two decades building and scaling businesses across the biopharma sector. He was part of the leadership team that transformed Catalent from a private equity spinoff into a publicly traded global CDMO, where he led multiple successful acquisitions and integrations. Since joining Ardena as CEO in 2024, he has been steering the company through one of the most volatile periods in pharmaceutical manufacturing history.
In a recent PharmaSource podcast episode, Jeremie explains how CDMOs can build resilient partnerships, when to specialize versus diversify, and what it takes to earn a seat at the table with pharma and biotech clients.
Resilience and Adaptability
Jeremie reflects on how the past several months have reinforced the importance of resilience in an increasingly dynamic environment. Speaking at CPHI 2025 in Frankfurt, he notes that despite recent volatility, the industry is showing renewed optimism.
“Resilience and adaptability clearly have been key traits to successfully develop your career,” Jeremie says. “It’s a very dynamic environment, to say the least, but it’s also an exciting environment.”
He credits early career mentors at larger companies for helping him develop leadership skills that now serve him in navigating ambiguous situations. The energy at this year’s CPHI—with more client interactions and booth traffic than in recent years—suggests the sector may be regaining confidence.
Integrated Development Capabilities
While the CDMO sector remains fragmented with hundreds of players competing across Europe and beyond, Ardena has carved out a distinct position through its development-focused approach.
“The Ardena story really started with the D in CDMO,” Jeremie explains. “The core DNA, the core values of the company have always been around providing good science for developing new molecules and therapies.”
The company’s competitive advantage lies in offering an integrated set of solutions to biotech innovators. Formulation development, process development, and analytical development remain at Ardena’s core. But what makes the offering unique is how these capabilities connect across drug substance strategy, process synthesis, analytical capabilities for both CMC and bioanalysis, GLP capabilities, and CMC regulatory support.
“That integrated set of capabilities has been a key USP for the company,” Jeremie says.
Doubling Down on Precision Medicine
More recently, Ardena has made substantial investments in what Jeremie calls “a very exciting field”—precision medicine. Much of today’s innovation targets unmet patient needs in smaller populations, requiring more complex therapies, formulations, and precise delivery mechanisms.
“A lot of the innovation is around unmet patient needs, where you need to develop more complex therapies and more complex formulations that help address a smaller patient population,” Jeremie said. “As a company, that is where we are investing and doubling down.”
Ardena’s nanomedicine capabilities complement this strategic focus. The company has developed what Jeremie describes as “the broadest and widest range of nanoparticle design and manufacturing in industry,” spanning LNP and liposome-based carriers to micelle-based carriers, polymer nanoparticles, and metal-based nanoparticles.
This expertise developed organically over 12 years, beginning with complex conjugation projects in the company’s Oss, Netherlands, facility. Many Ardena colleagues now have over 10 years of experience in nanomedicine—depth that few competitors can match.
What Strategic Partnership Really Means
The phrase “strategic partnership” has become ubiquitous in pharma, but Jeremie points out that its meaning varies by organization. “It requires humility from CDMOs,” he said, “since every client defines a strategic partnership differently.”
For some biotechs, strategic partnership means having the right agility and flexibility to adjust support quickly as clinical progress, funding levels, or formulation opportunities shift. For others, it means supporting multiple assets within a pipeline, potentially requiring dedicated project managers, different governance structures, or specific commercial terms.
“Our job is to make sure that we can flex along these types of collaboration models to support the particular needs of those clients,” Jeremie says.
Capacity Planning
With tariff volatility and shifting funding patterns creating widespread uncertainty, capacity planning and investment decisions have become increasingly challenging.
“I don’t think it’s just difficult – it’s impossible to forecast what’s going to come next,” he says. But rather than paralysis, he advocates focusing on core strengths and differentiated capabilities that will deliver unique value to clients.
“If you believe that you have those strengths and those right capabilities, then you’ve got to parse out some of the noise and the volatility, and stay true to your strategy.”
Pharmaceutical manufacturing remains fundamentally a long-cycle industry. Despite innovations in AI-driven discovery and regulatory flexibility through orphan, fast track, and breakthrough designations, bringing molecules from concept to commercial launch still takes years—with high failure rates along the way.
“You have to walk that fine line to be true to your North Star, where you want to invest, what we want to be really good at,” Jeremie says. “Accept that there will be some curve balls along the way. There will be some bumps, but if you are deliberate in your investments, if you’re deliberate in the capabilities that you’re building with your team, you will be able to provide sustainable and reliable service to your clients.”
Building Supply Chain Resilience
Jeremie notes the industry took supply chain resilience seriously during COVID, when disruptions affected everything from PPE gear to consumables and starting materials.
“There was a recognition that supply chain resilience was a core tenet to running a CDMO and making sure that you were not the bottleneck for your clients,” he says.
Today’s disruptions may be different in nature and magnitude, but, in Jeremie’s view, the fundamentals remain the same: second sourcing of key suppliers, appropriate inventory management, and proactive planning based on client forecasts.
Beyond operational excellence, resilience requires the right attitude and DNA within the organization. Teams and leaders need to be comfortable navigating ambiguity and accepting that not everything can be forecasted.
“Good communication internally, good communication with your clients, good communication with your suppliers, good communication with the regulators, is going to be essential to navigate those bumps and demonstrate long-term resilience,” Jeremie says.
Strategic US Expansion
Ardena has grown as a European CDMO with an established network and footprint across Europe. The company’s recent US expansion through its Somerset, New Jersey acquisition was strategically deliberate—and the timing, in retrospect, proved fortuitous.
“We would not have anticipated the timing to be better when we announced the acquisition of our Somerset New Jersey operation,” Jeremie says.
The decision to expand into the US reflects the reality that the US is the number one market in life sciences, with significant innovation and local support requirements. The current volatile environment has only reinforced the advantage of supporting clients in both Europe and the US.
Jeremie sees a clear trend toward supply chain regionalization that began during COVID: US for US, EU for EU, Asia for Asia, and within Asia, China for China.
At the same time, the global nature of pharmaceutical development remains strong. For bioanalysis supporting global clinical trials with patients enrolled across North America, Europe, and APAC, clients value local testing capability in each region—but with enterprise-wide standardization of processes, systems, LIMS, QMS, protocols, and instrumentation.
“You need to have both. It is an ‘and’ equation,” Jeremie explains. “Clients really feel one experience that is seamless, but have the regional flexibility for their local supply and their local needs.”
Sustainability as Core Strategy
Sustainability has evolved from a nice-to-have to a foundational element of operations. Ardena is rolling out a new sustainability platform with commitments through EcoVadis certification and the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
“This is an anchor to what we do. This is part of our foundational values,” Jeremie says.
Sustainability matters for employee mission and engagement, for clients who increasingly mandate specific objectives and certifications, and for investors focused on long-term value creation. Major pharma companies now make sustainability a contractual requirement, with Scope 3 emissions driving significant attention to CDMO partners.
“This is part of the fabric—employee, clients, but also investors,” Jeremie says. While the journey is time- and resource-intensive, especially for mid-sized organizations, Ardena’s team has made substantial progress.
“You have to accept that this is a journey. Every year, trying to be better, trying to live up to the commitments, challenge yourself, look for some best practices.”
What Makes Acquisitions Successful
With extensive M&A experience, Jeremie offers clear perspective on what makes acquisitions work beyond the obvious factors like capacity and technology fit.
“Get a feel of the management team, because ultimately they’re going to be more than half of the success, or not, of the integration of that asset in your organization,” he says.
Ardena’s Somerset acquisition benefited from an established, mature leadership team with many years at the site. They had guided numerous clients from clinic to commercial launch and shared values aligned with Ardena’s core principles.
Increasingly important factors include infrastructure elements: Has the target already begun the sustainability journey? Are they on a digital transformation path, or is everything paper-based?
“Those become deal features,” Jeremie said. “Those are things you go after. But fundamentally, the team is something that I’ve found to be the most important success factor over the years.”
Renewed Industry Optimism
Despite ongoing volatility, Jeremie sees reasons for optimism. Quality biotech assets addressing unmet patient needs with good science are attracting renewed VC funding.
“The funding of the biotech has resumed for quality assets. If you are going after unmet patient needs with good science, the VCs are backing you up, are supporting you,” he said.
For CDMOs, the mission remains to enable those innovators to succeed.
“It’s our job as CDMO to remain the enablers for those innovators. Very bullish on the space, very bullish for the company.”
