“We can adjust and be flexible around equipment configuration, but we can’t be flexible around what is a clear communicator and an honest partner.”
Damien Perriman is Chief Commercial Officer at ExoZymes, a Nasdaq-listed company using AI-enhanced enzymes to produce pharmaceutical and nutraceutical compounds without living cells. He spent two decades commercializing biotechnologies at multiple companies, scaling up seven different technologies, before joining ExoZymes just over a year ago.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Damien explains how ExoZymes is running its first major CDMO selection process for a platform unlike anything most contract manufacturers have run before, and why the company is weighing communication and cultural fit as heavily as technical capability.
Communication Beats Equipment Match in CDMO Selection
ExoZymes has issued an RFP to 10 CDMOs for the next stage of tech transfer of its lead compound, NCT. On paper, the RFP is about capability and schedule. In practice, Damien explains, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“We look for whether there is a schedule that we can work with to enter those manufacturing operations,” he says. “But also what we’re really looking for is, is there a good fit here? Is this a company that speaks with credibility, that speaks with honesty? Is it a company that values transparency? Is this a company that’s very honest about where things match and where things don’t match?”
These questions are extremely important during CDMO selection, Damien argues, because equipment can be adjusted and processes can be reconfigured, but a partner’s honesty can’t be engineered after the fact.
“That cultural fit and the quality of communications, in our mind and certainly in our experience, is more important than having the exact right pots and pans in the exact right place,” he says. “Because we can adjust and be flexible around equipment configuration, but we can’t be flexible around what is a clear communicator and an honest partner.”
Real CDMO Partners Challenge Assumptions
Screening 10 CDMOs down to a shortlist rules out visiting all of them. “You can’t pull off 10 site visits when you’re a company our size,” Damien says. “I’ve gotta screen that RFP down to a handful of lead candidates that make sense.”
When Damien visits a potential partner, he is looking for whether the people behind the facility are the kind of people his team can actually work with.
“I’d rather visit a site where I can climb up a set of stairs and kick the side of a big tank than actually walk through a set of labs,” Damien says.
A site visit does provide an opportunity to verify what has already been presented on paper and in photographs. But for Damien, its real value lies in testing the cultural fit. That becomes apparent not from the equipment on the factory floor, but from the conversations that happen around it.
“It’s when you sit down in a room, and they bring in the plant operators, or they bring in the project managers or the technical supervisors, and they start having a conversation on why this won’t work and what you need to do to make it work,” he says.
That willingness to challenge assumptions and talk openly about problems is what Damien is really looking for. Rather than simply promising that a project can be done, a strong potential partner is prepared to explain where the difficulties lie and work through how they might be overcome.
“That’s when you go, okay, now we’ve reached a place where we know that we’ve got a partner that could be a really strong possibility for us.”
What Separates a Strong RFP Response From a Weak One
For a company issuing an RFP for a process no CDMO has run before, technical capability is only the entry ticket. According to a whitepaper, 8 Critical Questions for CDMO Selection recently published on PharmaSource, gaps in a proposal are common. What a sponsor does with them is what counts, explains Damien.
“Technical capability does matter, and strong proposals are those where you get this consistent sense of communication from the first interaction to the last,” he says. “What really does separate a strong one is where you see the effort that’s been put in to identifying the gaps.”
He doesn’t expect a CDMO to have every answer up front, but he does expect them to say so. “I don’t expect the partner to be able to answer every question on the first email exchange. Knowing that you’ve got someone thinking about where this project will encounter problems, because you know it will, that’s where you can get a sense of whether this is a company that’s truly engaged and truly wants our business. It’s not about who can prove they know everything. It’s who can build that level of trust with us that we’ll be able to make this work.”
Where to Compromise
Every molecule and every biotech’s process design is different, so Damien doesn’t expect a perfect match to ExoZymes’ process schematic. Equipment configuration is negotiable. Trust isn’t.
“It’s difficult to find a CDMO that has exactly the process schematic as we have specced in our process design,” he says. “I’m willing to compromise around exact unit operations, exact configurations, if I know I’ve got a partner that will help us make it fit. Sometimes what I’ve encountered is a partner actually has a better solution than what we’ve designed — having a partner that’s willing to put their hand up and say, ‘Hey, pause a little bit, I think we’ve actually got a better solution for you, are you open to hearing it?’ We are. But you can’t have an exchange like that unless you’ve built the trust in the first place.”
That trust also has to hold up under pressure from ExoZymes’ own board. “I go before our board, and I speak to our shareholders, and I say, we’re going to start tech transfer to our CDMO in this quarter. I need to be able to have an exchange with a partner that I know they’re gonna back me up on that. I’ve scaled up seven technologies now in my career, and every single one of them encountered something that was molecule-specific in quality that we did not realize was going to be an issue until we had scaled up. So understanding those risks and being very honest about them — I need to have a really genuine, hardworking partner so I can regulate that risk to my stakeholders.”
Competing for CDMO Capacity as a Smaller Biotech
A platform company with a small pipeline doesn’t win capacity by out-volumizing big pharma. As PharmaSource has previously covered, smaller biotechs face a structurally different negotiation than large sponsors, and Damien’s approach is to sell what’s coming next, not what’s needed today.
“Big pharma may fill today’s production schedule, but platform companies help fill the next decade’s production schedule,” he says. “When I talk to partners, I talk about the potential of our pipeline. A product that we’ve led and brought through the scale-up process gives us a lot more credibility than just being a science company that says, hey, we’re gonna go do this and change the world of biomanufacturing.”
He backs the pitch with numbers a CDMO can actually underwrite. “I talk a lot to the business fundamentals. We can make a product that costs this much, we can sell it, it costs this much, there’s a market demand that looks like this. Bringing more openness to how we see the business case to our CDMOs helps us secure mind share of how they’re planning their operations.” There’s a less quantifiable factor too: “New technology is exciting. Engineers and scientists at our hearts, we’re geeks. I often see the glint of excitement in people’s eyes, particularly in the technologists’ eyes, when we go into a room and say, here’s how we’re doing this.”
Standardized Platform, Bespoke Molecule: How ExoZymes Approaches Tech Transfer
Tech transfer is a recurring bottleneck in outsourcing, and Damien says ExoZymes’ answer is half standardized. The platform’s upstream methods repeat well. The molecule-specific finish line doesn’t.
“There’s certainly a lot of standardization in the way we’re building our platform around analytical methods, around the way we pitch and run the cell-free reaction process itself, or even in the fermentations that are making the enzymes to drive our cell-free reaction,” he says. “But every molecule has its own peculiarity around product recovery and purification. Whilst we can be a lot more standardized on the upstream part of the process, it gets a little bit more finicky as you get to that final product. You want it at that 99%-plus pure kind of level, and you’ve got to put a little bit of distinct effort molecule by molecule.”
The Confirmation Bias Trap: Why You Have to Sweat the Details During Scale-Up
Asked what he’d tell his younger self starting his first platform, Damien’s answer was about discipline, and a bias he’s watched trip up scale-up teams, including his own.
“Breathe. Scaling is hard, and there’s no substitution for preparedness, no substitution for being rigorous in the questions that you’re asking,” he says. “One of the things that I, as a business and commercial guy that’s really trying to drive capital in and outcomes from scaling processes, is sometimes you find yourself in this confirmation bias of when you see a problem, you want to know it’s not a problem. And so you can gloss over that and look for the wins and ignore what the small issues are. I’ve made that mistake before, and that small issue turned into a bigger issue.”
Looking back, he says he’d slow down. “I think if I look back at how I interacted with my engineering teams, I probably pushed past the problems more quickly than I should have. I’d go back and sweat the details a little bit more, breathe, give everyone — myself in particular — a little more patience to say, okay, let’s understand this, let’s spend the time and get to know, let’s become intimate with what that issue is, and avoid it becoming a bigger issue later.”
