CPHI Americas 2025: The Evolving Role of the CDMO

As part of its coverage of CPHI Americas 2025, which was held in Philadelphia from May 20–22, 2025, Pharmaceutical Technology® interviewed Christy Eatmon, global subject matter expert for Sterile Drug Products at Thermo Fisher Scientific, about the company’s presence at the event, and some of its latest ventures including the Accelerator Drug Development services that Thermo Fisher rolled out in the fall of 2024.

Also included in the discussion was Thermo Fisher’s contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) perspective on world events in 2025 and how they relate to the pharmaceutical industry, particularly higher global tariffs and the emergence of more widely used and available smart technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

“I think in the past, CDMOs functioned as ‘just the hands,’ just a manufacturing house. Now we really want to partner with our customers,” Eatmon says in the interview. “We want to be the trusted partner, the team that’s bringing innovation to the market. We have added some aspects of AI to our processes. One of those to know, especially on the drug product side, is that we’ve integrated AI-assisted inspection. This is for large-scale commercial programs right now, but basically, we have a module where we’ve been able to decrease rejects, improving our yields, and then also using very expedited, very fast automated visual inspection—as every serial product, every unit, needs to be inspected, either by person, manually, or automated by a system of cameras.”

Click the video above to watch the full interview.

Eatmon is featured in the June issue of Pharmaceutical Technology, where she and other representatives of CDMOs across the industry discuss the changing nature of outsourcing models.