Olon Biotech and Small Molecules Explained [CDMO Sessions]

The CDMO Sessions are a series of interviews with leaders at Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisations about what makes their business unique and to share advice for how to create better strategic partnerships.
We spoke to the two Vice Presidents from Olon Group responsible for their Biotech and Small Molecules businesses respectively, Andrea Conforto VP for Biotech and Roberta Pachera, VP Small Molecules.


Olon Biotech
Andrea Conforo explains how Olon use ,icrobial fermentation technology, with two anufacturing sites located in Italy. 
“We are very flexible and can offer fermentation capabilities that support the product from early clinical stages up to large commercial production with 100,000 litres of capability”
“When partnering we typically create a ‘mirror team’ to communicate directly with all the project subject matter experts a partner has. Speed is a key milestone for us, and we try to set reasonable project stages to match the customer’s timeline."



Olon Small Molecules
Roberta Pachera leads the team focusing primarily on production of Intermediates and  final APIs on behalf of innovators or generic companies, from large, mid-sized companies or startups.
Roberta highlights how Olon is able to reduce customer time to market while maintaining product quality because ” everything is under one roof”.
“We suppor customers through the entire product lifecycle, which means we don’t need to go through multiple technology transfers from one company to another. In addition we have  a technology platform which offers a toolbox of small molecules which we can offer to customers.”
Roberta gave the example of how they worked during COVID to support a small startup to go from from initial preclinical research, to producing clinical batches to face-to-face clinical studies, all within less than 18 months.
Olon have over 300 people in Research and Development, and have forged strong links with academia in Italy, Netherlands and United States which helps them to stay on the cutting-edge. 
“We have an innovative R&D team who have, amongst other things, been working on our sustainability impact with the water we use. We now measure the water quality at the start and end of the manufacturing process.”
The first step is to make sure the CDMO project team fully understand the goals and drivers of a project in detail so that they can add real value.
“We always aim to have an open environment with partners, so that we can better understand why a customer is asking for something. We are the operational experts so with the right information will often make recommendations and propose a better  solution.” says Andrea.
A two-way relationship will generally help to reduce costs. 
“Our aim is always to reduce the customer’s investment as much as possible.  For example, our Downsteam Processing (DSP) purification will work with customers to reuse as much technology as possible from what we have already in-house.  This can dramatically reduce the cost of goods. All this implies a long collaboration, moving from transactional customer relationship to partner.”
Roberta adds that there are additional savings that comes from process optimisation when manufacturing large quantities.  
“When you are manufacturing large quantities of Intermediates or Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, it is recommended to use modern tools like Process Modelling to help you reduce production costs.” 

To find out more, check out the Olon website