Thermo Fisher Launches OpenAI Partnership at CPHI Frankfurt 2025: Part One

Pharmaceutical Technology® Group had the opportunity to interview Jennifer Cannon, PhD, president, Commercial Operations, Pharma Services at Thermo Fisher Scientific, as part of its coverage of CPHI Frankfurt 2025. Cannon delivered a presentation at the conference entitled “What’s Your Next Move—and What Will it Cost You? Driving Value Under Pressure” on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025.

Additionally, one year after Thermo Fisher’s Accelerator Drug Development suite of services was unveiled as the company’s major announcement at CPHI Milan 2024, a strategic collaboration with OpenAI headlined Thermo Fisher’s latest news in Frankfurt. This partnership, according to Thermo Fisher, will leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve the speed and predicted success of drug development.

“What the OpenAI partnership allows us to do is, when you think about what goes into setting up trial sites—and some of these Phase III programs, especially the cardiovascular ones, require hundreds of clinical trial sites to be activated in a very short amount of time—as the biotech and pharma customers that we have get good readouts, and they're embarking upon these hundreds of clinical trials to set up, OpenAI will help us to better optimize how we activate these sites,” Cannon says in the interview. “How we do simple things from just the intake patient consent forms [to] how we look at our quality control processes and how we look to standardize those across all of our clinical trial sites.”

Check back shortly for part two of Cannon’s conversation with PharmTech Group.

Click here for all of our CPHI Frankfurt coverage.

Transcript

Editor's note: This transcript is a lightly edited rendering of the original audio/video content. It may contain errors, informal language, or omissions as spoken in the original recording.

I am Jennifer Cannon. I head up the commercial organization for Thermo Fisher’s CDMO [contract development and manufacturing organization]. We call it the Pharma Services group. And that includes all functions that pertain to a variety of different modalities, so we support our customers with small-molecule API manufacturing to biologics/large molecule, emerging cell and gene therapies, as well as the drug products. That includes oral solid dose as well as steriles manufacturing, vial and syringe.

We're thrilled. The timing of this announcement and press release and our strategic collaboration and partnership with OpenAI is very timely with CPHI. So all of our teams are excited, of course. I want to talk a little bit about that, and it really piggybacks well onto our announcement last year around Accelerator Drug Development, as well as, simply, the capabilities and what it allows us to do for our customers, in partnership with OpenAI.

That's one element of our press release, it's the headliner, [and] it’s really the focal point of what we're ambitious in doing. When we announced Accelerator Drug Development, it was really for customers that deal with a very fragmented supply chain. They may be pharma customers that have overflow clinical drug development programs that they can't fit within their own network internally, or their own CDMO network or CRO [contract research organization] network. A lot of these customers that are experiencing the benefits of Accelerator are within biotech, and they're looking for a simplified approach to how they manage their supply chain and how they manage their clinical trials.

It's all in the spirit of providing better flexibility, reducing costs, but most importantly, it's about saving time. And so, we've done this now with over 250 different customers, biotech and pharma, across 700 different clinical trials. And what the OpenAI partnership allows us to do is, when you think about what goes into setting up trial sites—and some of these Phase III programs, especially the cardiovascular ones, require hundreds of clinical trial sites to be activated in a very short amount of time—as the biotech and pharma customers that we have get good readouts, and they're embarking upon these hundreds of clinical trials to set up, OpenAI will help us to better optimize how we activate these sites. How we do simple things from just the intake patient consent forms [to] how we look at our quality control processes and how we look to standardize those across all of our clinical trial sites.

And then during the trials, if you think about the number of documents and reports that have to be authored, they’re up in the range of 10 to 15,000. What OpenAI will allow us to do is manage through and import all of that data, author those documents, and turn those [around] in a much more efficient way. What we've been modeling is the ability to save between 25% and 60% time savings. It's pretty significant, if you think about how much manual labor is being done during a clinical trials program and project.

So what that allows us to do is generate data for our customers that much sooner, so then they can make decisions. Do they advance through to the next phase? Are they going to have to take a pause, raise more funding? Maybe it was a readout that wasn't as predicted, and they've got to pivot and resource and use their funds in a different way. All of this is in the spirit of going faster and allowing better decision-making to be done in a faster, more optimized, and efficient manner.

So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an understanding of OpenAI. We're planning to use it in the CRO, CDMO, and across different parts of Thermo Fisher enterprise-wide. The opportunities for efficiency are really endless.

This industry is always new and exciting. I've been in the CDMO space for 13 years, and health and life sciences for even longer, my entire career, since I left the bench.

And now it really [revolves] around global volatility, and you've got this uncertainty with geopolitical constraints and new guidelines, so we come back to a year later. Last year we launched Accelerator Drug Development, and more and more customers want—if they haven't started working with us across all of the offerings within Accelerator Drug Development—they want to know, how's it working? How exactly are you doing it? What do the data look like? And so I’m sharing some of our case studies and where we've been successful in helping customers, Phases I through III.

A lot of customers have asked about the ‘how.’ Before it was, of course, you have a CDMO, you have a CRO, and customers are now using the two of you, but that one plus one equals three. How are you employing this? And then again, what do those data look like?

As I mentioned, to date, we have embarked on and completed, in total, 700 programs. They span 14 therapeutic areas. About 90% of our Accelerator Drug Development customers are [in] biotech, 10% are in pharma, and they come to us for the ability to make just-in-time decisions, so for flexibility, and they come to us for the speed. So we'll be talking a little bit about some of the time savings and cost savings. And really, it's not so much the cost savings, as much as it is the faster you get into clinic and to commercializing, the sooner you are delivering therapies to patients, generating revenue, and making decisions through the clinical drug development journey.