Ahead of CPHI Milan, EPM spoke to Thierry Van Nieuwenhove, CEO of Quotient Sciences, to explore how the company is innovating to meet the growing demand for personalised medicine through AI, partnerships and meeting sustainability goals.
Q. How are you innovating to meet the growing demand for personalised medicine and cell and gene therapies?
Quotient Sciences supports the development of more personalised treatments for paediatric patients and clinical trial materials manufacturing. We have a lot of expertise in developing paediatric formulations that better meet the needs of children and adolescents, as well as their caregivers. For example, selecting age-appropriate dosage form(s) and appropriate excipients to use in the formulations are two major considerations in developing paediatric therapies and where we have lent our expertise to customers.
Similarly, our clinical trial supply team works with customers to design the most efficient process for drug product supply to their global clinical sites, and that has included provisioning individual patient kits. We can develop and manufacture small molecule and synthetic peptide drug products and integrate a flexible packaging, labelling, and distribution strategy to meet the needs of our customers’ global trials.
Finally, we are also looking into new applications of our flagship translational pharmaceutics platform in mRNA. Over the last 16 years, we’ve proven impressive time and cost savings for clients using translational pharmaceutics to develop, manufacture, and test their small molecule and synthetic peptide therapeutics. The next generation of mRNA medicines is here, and translational pharmaceutics is a natural fit in this space that will allow companies greater speed-to-market and increased chance of success for new RNA-developed therapies.
Q. What strategies are you implementing to address supply chain challenges in a post-pandemic world?
Expanding our flagship translational pharmaceutics platform remains a key objective for us. A combination of CDMOs and CROs are usually required for drug development programs, with handovers at different points over the course of a program that can take time. Inherently, this platform helps streamline the outsourcing model, but also offers advantages with API savings because we are able to make smaller drug product batches, just enough for what is needed to dose in our clinics and iterate drug product formulations based on real-time, emerging clinical data.
The next generation of mRNA medicines is here, and translational pharmaceutics is a natural fit in this space."
Q. How are you adapting your sustainability goals to meet new regulatory pressures and environmental expectations?
Our commitment to environmental, social, and corporate governance initiatives are essential elements of our company strategy. Each year, we participate in an ECOVADIS assessment of our performance to help us to drive improvement year on year. For 2024, we are pleased to announce that we have improved our score by 10 points. This increase demonstrates our ongoing commitment to sustainability, and in recognition of that, EcoVadis also awarded us the Commitment Badge. This accolade highlights our dedication to sustainable practices across environmental, social and governance areas. We have embraced ESG principles wholeheartedly and aim to develop our sustainability goals further in the years to come. We hold ourselves accountable, knowing that ethical practices build trust and resilience, and that by championing ESG we contribute to creating a better world for all.
Q. What roles do digital transformation and AI play in improving efficiency in your manufacturing processes?
We are actively looking at new applications of AI within our business. Given the unique position that we have that spans chemistry, pharmaceutical and clinical capabilities, we believe generative AI has the potential to deliver truly transformational impact for customers. Linking our history of drug development, including over 500 Quotient Sciences translational pharmaceutics programs completed over 16 years, we can see the progression of a molecule to a formulation to the clinical result from healthy volunteer trials and use those learnings for the benefit of optimised formulations for our customers’ programs.
Q. How are partnerships and collaborations influencing your approach to drug development and manufacturing?
Coming out of COVID-19, CDMOs such as Quotient Sciences continued to thrive by providing innovative solutions, a deep understanding of science, and strategic partnership to clients.
We are committed to partnership and collaboration, and that’s reflected in how we approach every client program. An example is recent work on customer programs with companies including Vasa Therapeutics. With Vasa, we just help them reach a major clinical milestone with the first human subjects dosed at Quotient Sciences’ Nottingham, UK clinic for VS-041, in development as the first personalised medicine-based treatment of Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), or diastolic heart failure, which is life-threatening. Quotient Sciences’ translational pharmaceutics platform was selected to accelerate the drug into first-in-human (FIH) trials. Dosing just began and is ongoing, we supported on-demand manufacture of an immediate release (IR) tablet that will allow for dosing and generation of clinical data in a shortened time.
Generally, you can also look at our approach to project management, too. Project management is a lynchpin of integrating activities across scientific functions to complete work with our clients. Our project managers control activities across functions and sites more varied than almost any other provider in our sector. We’re providing a single partner for our customers. It is something we are very proud of.