PharmaSource Podcast

“If our suppliers fail, we’ll fail, and if they succeed, we’ll succeed.” That’s how José Francisco Vallejo Cabrera of Sanofi describes big pharma’s relationship with its suppliers on sustainability, and it was a message repeated in every conversation at the CPHI Milan 2026 Sustainability Summit.
PharmaSource spoke to five sustainability leaders on the show floor. José Francisco Vallejo Cabrera, Global Head of Environment and Environmental Sustainability at Sanofi, has more than 25 years in sustainability, spanning environmental certification, energy management, health and safety, and human rights. He was joined by Marc Roodhuyzen de Vries, Cofounder and CEO of sustainability consultancy Nexio Projects, and his colleague Rachit Paliwal, lead ESG consultant. The other guests were James Swinyard, senior director of investments and partnerships at the nonprofit My Green Lab; Hywel Woolf, Global Sustainability Manager at Sharp Services; and Simon Hodgson, Industry and Technology Sector Lead for Europe at SLR, which provides the secretariat for the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI).
In the latest PharmaSource podcast episode, they explain why pharma supply chain sustainability is moving from targets to delivery. They also cover what buyers and suppliers each need to change to get there.
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“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.
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“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.
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“If the data you give it is weak, the model becomes a liability rather than an asset. In regulated industries, that’s not just a technical failure; it’s potentially a compliance and an ethical failure as well,” says Amie Harpe.
Amie Harpe spent 23 years at Pfizer’s global IT organization, leading quality and manufacturing systems programs worth up to $40 million across 65 manufacturing sites worldwide. She’s now the founder of Sakara Digital, a boutique consultancy helping pharma and biotech organizations get more value from digital transformation, with a focus on quality management systems, pharma data quality, and AI readiness.
In a recent PharmaSource podcast episode, Amie explains why pharma’s digital transformation gap persists and what separates organizations that get lasting value from their technology investments from those that don’t.
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At CDMO Live Europe 2026, Alexander Schäfer, Business Development Manager at Sharp, laid out the scale of the GLP-1 packaging challenge and identified the three collaboration failures most likely to prevent CDMOs and their pharma partners from meeting surging demand.
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