“Quality is not a department. You need to build it into a culture,” says Monica Huang, Zydus Life Sciences.
“The Future of Life Sciences According to Leaders” panel at Making Pharmaceuticals 2026 was moderated by Luke Blaney of Arx Recruitment Solutions and brought together Nick Brand of Peak Thinking Ltd, Ibe Emeh, Setax Training and Consultancy Limited, Nigel Richardson, Custom Pharma Services, and Monica Huang, Zydus Life Sciences. They covered AI adoption, quality at scale, funding pressures, and the structural shift reshaping pharma supply chains.
Quality Culture Is an Infrastructure Decision
The fastest-growing pharma companies are also among the most exposed if they treat quality as a compliance checkpoint rather than an operating system. Monica was direct about the consequences.
“A lot of companies make the mistake of thinking, ‘let’s bring things forward and then build a strong quality system to help us scale.’ That’s where you pay twice as much energy to fix it.”
Zydus spent eight months building a comprehensive QMS before launching UK operations and before filing a single product. The result, Monica explains, is a team that can move fast within a framework, without firefighting deviations at every turn.
Nigel reinforced the point from a CDMO operator’s perspective. Quality cannot be commercially owned. When production timelines consistently override quality decisions, he said, “it’s the regulator who’ll do it for you.”
AI Is Already Delivering, But Governance Is the Differentiator
The panel debated how to use AI without compromising GMP controls.
Ibe compares the disruptive nature of AI to the internet. AI is on the same trajectory. The question is whether your organization adopts early or catches up later.
However, Ibe continues, AI is not a replacement for people. “Human creativity comes from experience and exposure. AI can only draw on what already exists. That distinction matters enormously in a regulated environment.”
Nick agrees and stresses the importance of humans as the decision makers, and the value of AI depends entirely on the quality of the humans overseeing it. Skilled people protect the integrity of AI outputs, and that, he noted, is what regulators expect to see.
“AI can draft a deviation report faster than any human. But if the person reviewing it has never written one themselves, they won’t know when it’s wrong.”
As AI embeds in CDMO quality systems, the depth of the team behind it matters more, not less. Automation without expertise is a compliance risk dressed up as efficiency.
Localizing Supply Chains
Monica spoke about a move from global supply optimization to regional manufacturing control.
“The mindset needs to shift to the consistency of supply. We need some level of control of the critical output within the country that you operate in.”
For decades, pharma supply chains stretched across continents in pursuit of margin. The pandemic exposed the fragility of that model, but geopolitical volatility, trade restrictions, geographic instability, and API concentration risk are now making the cost of that dependency impossible to ignore.
Zydus’s own UK strategy illustrates the direction: acquiring a manufacturing site in Northampton, producing niche liquids for both UK and export markets, and filing more than 85 products in under three years.
CDMOs with regional manufacturing redundancy, dual-source API capabilities, and clear supply chain mapping are becoming strategically valuable.
Short-Term Investment Cycles Are a Supply Chain Risk
Nigel made a case that the financial sector’s impatience is actively damaging pharma’s ability to deliver medicines.
“Three to five years is not long enough for anybody to realize the potential of good science. We are becoming victims of financial greed rather than social responsibility.”
He pointed to China’s pharmaceutical rise from near-zero domestic production in 2005 to generating 30% of the world’s new chemical entities today as evidence of what long-term industrial planning achieves. This contrasts with Western political and investment cycles.
Leadership Under Pressure Is What Makes Partnerships Work
Asked what separates good leaders from great ones during inspections, recalls, or product failures, Nick and Nigel agreed that philosophy and composure should be established before the crisis, not during it.
Nick recalled a dual FDA/MHRA inspection where the site quality head set an expectation at the beginning: whatever pressure they faced, “we will not lose our relationships with each other.”
Nigel added the importance of creating space for collective thinking under stress, resisting the pull toward fast, unilateral decisions when stakes are highest, and bringing in outside expertise when internal capability has gaps.
When an issue arises at a CDMO, a batch failure, a regulatory observation, or a supply disruption, the quality of the response depends on the humans involved, not the contract. Factor relationship quality and communication standards into supplier evaluation, not just technical capability.
