“To us, it’s exactly the opposite of a marketing slogan. If we make a decision that has a negative impact on a patient, we’ve made a bad decision,” says Stuart Needleman.
Stuart Needleman is Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Patient Centricity Officer at Piramal Pharma Solutions. Before Piramal, he was President of Laurus Synthesis and President and COO of Aptuit, and he held earlier roles at Cambrex, Oxford Asymmetry, ChiRex, and Rhodia Pharma Solutions. He has spent 46 years in the CDMO industry and joined Piramal about a decade ago.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, recorded at CPHI Milan 2026, Stuart explains what patient centricity looks like inside a CDMO. He covers why Piramal made it a formal, company-wide structure rather than a tagline, and why he believes most of the industry won’t follow. He shares the practical details: volunteer councils at every site, mandatory training, and a simple decision rule for when the patient and the quarter’s revenue pull in different directions. Stuart will take these questions further as moderator of a roundtable on patient centricity at CDMO Live Americas in Boston this October.
From Customer Centricity to Patient Centricity
When Stuart entered the industry, contract manufacturing had grown out of spare capacity. “There were facilities around the United States and Europe that had empty reactors, so an industry was born, which was the contract manufacturing industry,” he recalls. For decades, the focus was on filling those reactors and growing revenue. Stuart says it left people without a sense of purpose.
About 20 years ago, the industry shifted toward customer centricity, which meant getting to know customers as people. The next shift at Piramal came in 2019, when the CEO at the time closed a leadership meeting by pointing to industries that had changed beyond recognition, from Starbucks to Blockbuster.
“And he said, ‘We need to move from customer centricity to patient centricity.’ And it was the end of the day. Next day, he was no longer with the organization. He was moving to another division of Piramal to run another business unit, and we were left to pick up, what does that mean? So I spent time with my sales team, I spent time with some outside coach, and we debated for a long time, what does that really mean?”
The answer they reached was about purpose. Having a clear reason to come to work would motivate employees and align Piramal with where its pharma customers were already heading. Stuart and his coach then visited every site to explain it to the people doing the work.
“You don’t realize that you have a family member who could be a patient of a medicine that we’re making that’s saving their lives. And you’re not just coming in to run analytical tests for eight hours, you’re actually working on a medicine that will get distributed to somebody.”
Patient Centricity as a Decision Rule, Not a Tagline
Stuart is blunt about how the phrase is used across the industry: “Everybody here talks the talk as a marketing slogan.” At Piramal, he says, it works as a test for every decision. That includes decisions far from the production floor.
“If we hold up a shipment because there’s some invoice question and your mother, father, spouse, whatever, doesn’t get a medicine, that’s our problem,” he says. “We have not done our job.”
He points to the pandemic as the clearest example of the rule in practice.
“COVID was the perfect example. When COVID came along, you had skeleton staffs at the facilities, and you had to get shipments out, and we make a lot of oncology products, so there’s special handling and how you have to ship it and whatnot, and we have to figure out how to do that, bring in staff, make sure that we had a truck ready to pick this up because it was a patient at the end of it.”
Stuart admits the patient and commercial priorities don’t always agree. “There’s definitely a push/pull, or we call it polarities,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it’s the patient that’s the driving force.” If the patient doesn’t win those arguments, he argues, “then your operating philosophy is not valid.”
He describes the model as a bullseye: patients at the center, customers in the next ring, and revenue outside that. “If we take care of the patient, the revenue will come, not the revenue comes, and we ship to the patient. So we flip the model.” Patient interest now sits alongside seamless collaboration and shared accountability as one of Piramal’s three operating philosophies.
The Structure Behind the Philosophy
Piramal’s main structural tool is a Patient Awareness Council at each of its 15 sites. The councils are deliberately not run by senior leaders.
“It’s a volunteer organization, and there’s a formal charter that we created. It is not senior leadership, so it’s one level down or lower in the organization. They meet on a routine basis and report to both myself and the site head, where they report on the projects they’re working on that are patient-centric. You start with awareness, and then they move to actual projects that could actually impact operational efficiency to get the product out the door faster to the patient.”
Stuart calls it “almost like an operational excellence combined with a patient philosophy.” Every year, sites compete for a Patient Awareness Excellence Award, which is voted on and presented at a global town hall. The most recent winner was the Pithampur site in India. It built a dashboard that tracks metrics with a downstream impact on the patient.
Some of the work is cultural rather than operational. Every site has a commitment wall. “One site has fingerprints,” Stuart says. “They actually have a tree that they drew, and you put your fingerprint about your commitment to patients.”
Leadership backing is visible too. When the India-based CEO visits a site, he meets its council. “It’s a top-down approach of a commitment,” Stuart says. He estimates that 15% of his own time goes to the patient centricity role and the rest to the commercial side.
Keeping Patient Centricity From Stalling
Stuart knows how corporate initiatives usually fade.
“When you always come out with a new initiative, you run fast and eventually you run into a wall, and you have to figure out the momentum stalled or stale, so how do you get over the mountain? So we continue to do trainings. We continue to use it as a recruiting tool. Piramal has a bunch of online learnings, and we make it a mandatory module, so it’s always reinforced.”
That module applies to every one of Piramal’s more than 5,000 employees. Stuart also sees it as a recruiting advantage with a multigenerational workforce. “Everybody is motivated by different things,” he says. “A lot of the younger people wanna be motivated by doing good.” He links this to Piramal’s long-standing philosophy of “doing well and doing good.”
Why Patient Centricity Is a Competitive Differentiator for CDMOs
Stuart is clear that patient centricity is not only internal: “It’s part of our selling. Our customers will feel it.” It appears on the third or fourth slide of every Piramal corporate presentation. One customer has publicly cited it as a reason for choosing Piramal.
“One of our customers on the West Coast asked us to come out and address their town hall of their hundreds of people and talk about how we implemented this strategy. And they were introducing us by saying, ‘We use these guys, and this is one of the reasons why we chose Piramal.’”
Not everyone was persuaded at first. At CPHI in 2019, months after the program launched, Stuart sat on a panel with some of the industry’s bigger CDMO names. “They looked at me like I had six heads, that I’m talking about patients and patient-centricity,” he says. “And I just said, ‘That’s why you’re gonna get left behind, because this is where we’re going.’”
Competitors have since added advocacy groups and similar programs. Stuart’s view is that “they don’t have a person who spends his time doing this.” He doesn’t expect that to change much.
“My honest opinion is that it’s not going anywhere. There’ll be 10 to 20 companies that focus. They’ll all use it as a tagline, ‘We’re patient focused.’ There’s too much focus on revenue here, and it’s never gonna get away, which is why it is a differentiator for us.”
This is relevant for sponsors weighing culture during partner selection. As PharmaSource has explored in its podcast on why cultural due diligence is crucial in CDMO selection, what a CDMO shows on the surface doesn’t always reflect how it operates day to day.
What’s Next: Cross-Site Projects and a Philosophy That Holds Under Pressure
Stuart’s next goal is to get sites working together. Until now, each council has developed its own ideas, even though Piramal sells integrated solutions across its network.
“We have two sites, one in Canada and one in Michigan. They’re sister sites. They do the same thing. Why can’t they work on the same project ideas? To get them together, the two councils, and talk about new operational patient things. That’s gonna be where I’m going next.”
That network spans Canada, the US, the UK, and India, with a buying office in China. Stuart says it gives customers supply resilience, tech transfer options, and room to manage tariffs and geopolitical risk. The trade-off is that some clients want everything co-located, so Piramal works harder to deliver “that global feel but local presence.”
Has the industry’s recent squeeze made the philosophy harder to sustain? Stuart says no. “It’s a core operating philosophy, so that doesn’t change.” What has changed, he says, is the effort to understand how customers see the geopolitical landscape and help them solve those problems.
Join Stuart at CDMO Live Americas
Stuart will moderate the roundtable Patient Centricity: What It Actually Means, and How To Do It Properly at CDMO Live Americas, held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel on October 20–21, 2026.
Most CDMOs talk about quality, timelines, and capacity. Very few build a formal, company-wide structure around the patient, who sits several steps removed from the contract manufacturer’s day-to-day work. The session will explore what patient centricity means in practice, why it remains rare in outsourcing rather than standard practice, and whether sponsors should look for it when they evaluate a partner. Discussion will cover:
- What does patient centricity actually look like in practice for manufacturing, and how is that different from the quality or compliance work CDMOs already do?
- Why hasn’t it caught on more broadly across the industry, and what makes it hard to build or justify?
- As a sponsor, would this factor into how you evaluate a CDMO, or is it not yet something you know how to assess?
Book your place at CDMO Live Americas to join the conversation.
