PharmaSource Podcast

“How good is your AI model? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what does your AI model actually help your company do?”
Seungik Cho, founder of Sapiens Health, has spent the past year pulling apart the assumption in biomanufacturing that a better-predicting AI model means a better digital twin. His research argues the opposite: that optimizing AI for prediction accuracy can cause these systems to fail in CDMO environments.
Seungik Cho is the founder of Sapiens Health and Director of Strategic Operations at Nucleate. He’s finishing his B.S. in Biological Physics at Rice University, where his research explores the intersection between computational biology and multimodal AI. He describes his work as building AI systems that are “trustworthy and deployable,” not just accurate on a benchmark. His recent publications include work on longitudinal CT lesion prediction (IEEE ISBI 2026) and gene network analysis (IEEE BHI 2025).
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Seungik explains why he believes CDMOs are pointing their AI investment in the wrong direction and lays out an alternative model built around diagnosis rather than prediction, explainability rather than confidence scores, and institutional memory rather than one-off forecasts.
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At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Dr. Olivier Aebischer, Deputy CEO at Interlabor Belp AG, demonstrated how a structured, dual-path analytical approach can identify manufacturing root causes in days, using two real contamination case studies from the lab’s operations.

“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.
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“Rather than saying that there’s a gap from the industry, I think there’s a listening gap from our governments.”
Neha Dave is an independent EU Government Affairs Advisor based in Brussels, with more than 20 years of experience across the EU institutions, agency-side consulting at Weber Shandwick, and government affairs and public policy at MedTech Europe. She advises pharma and medtech companies on entering and navigating the European market, with policy expertise spanning pharmaceuticals, MDR/IVDR, clinical trials, and the single market.
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, Neha explains how EU regulation, particularly the environmental and sustainability agenda, is landing on contract manufacturers, which legislation is already in force, what arrives in the next 12 to 18 months, and what CDMOs should be doing now to prepare.
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Moderated by Raman Sehgal, Host of Molecule to Market, this opening panel at CDMO Live Europe 2026 brought together Melanie Wamsler, External Network Strategy Lead, Takeda, Rocco Paracchini, Vice President, Morpho, Kaan-Fabian Kekec, Partner, Simon-Kucher, and Kurt Nielsen, President, Longview Leader, to assess market conditions, capital discipline, geopolitical risk, and pricing in contract manufacturing.
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