“You have to have something to work on together. You have to have something that you both are invested in. In this case, moving the molecule forward,” says Martin Meeson, CEO of Axplora.
That shared ambition is at the heart of Martin’s approach to strategic CDMO partnerships. By understanding what success looks like for each customer, he believes manufacturing partners can focus their expertise and investment where they make the greatest difference—helping promising medicines progress toward patients.
Martin Meeson has been CEO of Axplora since April 2024. Before that, he spent more than 15 years at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, where he was CEO through the pandemic. Axplora now runs 10 sites across three continents and works with more than 900 customers.
Pharma companies are moving away from transactional supplier relationships and toward long-term strategic partnerships. In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, recorded at CPHI, Martin explains what strategic CDMO partnerships look like from the CDMO side of the table. He covers why listening to customers shapes Axplora’s investment decisions, including its recent move to make exatecan itself, and what CDMOs need from sponsors in return.
Partnership Starts with a Shared Goal
For Martin, a real partnership is defined less by contract terms than by a shared goal. Both sides need to be invested in the same outcome: moving the molecule toward patients.
“Partnership in business is very much like partnerships in life. When they’re successful, I think the summary is you’re looking for a win-win situation. In a little bit more granularity, you have to have something to work on together. You have to have something that you both are invested in. In this case, moving the molecule forward.”
Time matters too. Martin notes that molecules often “start year zero and they don’t go commercial until around year 10.” Axplora’s deepest customer relationships go back several decades, and that history builds knowledge on both sides.
Openness Is What Turns a Relationship Strategic
Asked what Axplora needs from its customers, Martin’s answer is openness. Without it, a CDMO can’t know what a good outcome looks like for the sponsor.
“How do I look to a win-win scenario if I don’t know what success looks like to you? And that’s a question we always ask: what does success look like in 12 months’ time? You might assume everyone wants the same thing and that every company that’s developing these molecules has the same flavor. It’s definitely not the case. There’s very different needs within a broad portfolio, but they need to share them with us for us to understand them.”
He describes one program that changed once both sides opened up. “We tipped over that point July of this year, where we’re constantly having conversations,” he says. “They dropped down to the technical level, and then the technical people started talking, and that program between July and now has just… It has advanced at hyper speed.”
How can you tell a partnership is real? It shows up in behavior, not in slogans. Martin says that’s when Axplora is proactively suggesting ideas because it knows what the customer wants, or when the customer is thinking about what Axplora needs to succeed. “It’s not just saying the words, it’s actually happening in the day-to-day interactions.”
Customers Are the CDMO’s Crystal Ball for Investment Decisions
Martin argues that CDMOs already have the best forecasting tool available: their customers’ pipelines.
“Our customers are there. They’ve got long pipelines. They’re not thinking, ‘Oh, what am I gonna do next year?’ They’re thinking, ‘What is happening in the next five years? What is happening in the next 10 years?’ So I would never make an investment-based decision without a huge part of it being: where is the customer on this? Not just market data, because market data’s good and we do use it, but the best market data is that which you get off your customer.”
That input works in both directions. “We’ve decided not to do things because the customers have indicated a lower level of support, and we’ve decided to accelerate things because the customers are, ‘Oh, you’re thinking about that?’” In his view, “many of us do have access to a crystal ball, and I think many people in the industry don’t use it.”
Exatecan, a payload used in many ADCs in development, is the clearest recent example. Axplora already manufactured customer-owned versions, but it saw demand “not just from large pharma, but from our small biotechs… just a demand across the piece.” So it brought together teams from two sites to develop its own exatecan, which will have its own DMF. PharmaSource previously covered Axplora completing its first R&D batches of exatecan.
“We’re probably knocking maybe six to nine months off the development and manufacturing time of that particular element of the program, and that’s quite valuable time. So we’re just in the final stages of validation. We’ll run some validations and put some stock on the shelf available for customers, so that we can really help them shorten that piece.”
Customer demand also drove Axplora’s investment in highly potent APIs (HPAPIs). Martin says the company’s manufacturing site at Gropello, which he describes as having “the largest manufacturing capacity of highly potent API in Europe at the moment,” will add a new technical building early next year to support HPAPI development projects. The reasoning, according to Martin: “It’s all nice having shiny assets, but you do need that technical capability and the ability to develop and tech transfer in customer projects very smoothly, very reliably, very quickly.”
Be Honest When a Project Isn’t the Right Fit
Martin doesn’t see turning down work as a negative. He credits being “very honest and open from the start” as one of the reasons for Axplora’s recent success, and he applies that even with established partners.
“For some of our partners, even some that we have really good partnerships with, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, look, this probably isn’t the best fit for us. We can tell you what it would take. We can give you some indicative volumes and timings, but it probably won’t be the best you can get within the industry because it just doesn’t quite fit with our capabilities.’”
Martin explains that steering a partner away builds trust that pays off later, because “these aren’t just one molecule events. They’re multiple molecule events over several years.” His rule is simple: “What fits well, go for it, but if it doesn’t fit well, don’t try and put a round peg in a square hole.”
Match the Team Mindset to the Development Stage
Customer expectations, Martin says, haven’t really changed: do it quickly, reliably, and efficiently. What changes is what those words mean at each stage of development.
“At the early stage, it’s about speed to your good quality GMP material. And then as you’re starting to move through the different phases of clinical trial towards commercial, you’re starting to build in the robustness of the process. And then when you get to commercial, they would like to know, ‘When’s my product coming?’”
For early programs, speed also means failing fast: “If it’s gonna fail, get it to fail quickly, and then we’ll move on.” Commercial work needs a different mindset entirely. Martin argues that you don’t want an early-phase development team in the commercial space looking for ways to improve a validated process. The organization needs “these two sides of the brain.”
For sponsors, the payoff is not having to switch partners as a molecule matures. “You can come in and have a few kilos, and then we can continue to take the customers through to tons and tons of product within our network and often within the same facility where they’ve been working,” Martin says.
If he could change one thing about how sponsors and CDMOs work together, it would be getting to that trusted, open stage faster. “It’d be just great to be able to do that quickly, be in a position where we can be open and honest with one another, and just get those medicines moving,” he says.
That focus on patients runs through everything Martin says. Earlier in the conversation, he describes Axplora’s customers as “our door, our window through to the patient community.” He closes with a reminder for everyone working in pharma manufacturing:
“I’d like to remind everyone what an incredible place this is to work and invest our time and energy. Day to day, it might feel like we’re creating spreadsheets, batch records and technical documents. But ultimately, what we’re doing is developing medicines that make a real difference to patients’ lives. We probably all know someone who relies on medicines developed by us or others in our industry, and we’ve seen first-hand the enormous impact they can have on people’s lives.”
It’s a message he regularly shares with his own team. “Please just take a moment in your week, in your day, to remember that we work in a really cool industry,” Martin says. “We’re doing really good work, and we’re really having a positive impact on people’s lives.”
