PharmaSource Podcast

"Sponsors don't want to know how many SOPs you have on the shelf. They're really looking to see if you have sound judgment to take care of their program." 
Mohamad Ahmad, Vice President of Quality and Compliance at the Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) Inc., brings extensive quality leadership experience across the pharmaceutical industry. The BMC is a Canadian non-profit CDMO established in response to Canada’s effort to strengthen domestic biologics manufacturing capacity following the pandemic. There, Mohamad oversees quality systems across all biologics manufacturing operations, from early clinical through commercial scale.
In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Mohamad explains why a risk-based, science-driven approach to quality is the defining factor that separates strong CDMO partners from the rest — and how the BMC has built its quality organization to deliver that across every stage of a program's lifecycle.
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“The level of comfort with AI use in this space is pretty low right now.” Mike Boyson’s observation cuts to the heart of pharma’s AI dilemma. Hesitation is justified—but it shouldn’t paralyze action. His answer: build practical, compliant digital twins that operators can create in Claude without waiting for IT.
Mike is a supply chain and pharmaceutical operations leader with over 20 years of experience spanning CMC strategy, external manufacturing, and digital transformation. He spent more than a decade at Takeda leading oncology and biologics supply chain operations, served as Executive Director of Value Chain Leadership at Moderna, and now advises organizations at Azure Biopharma Consulting on adopting AI-driven solutions.
In a recent PharmaSource podcast episode, Mike shares concrete use cases for digital twins, explains how to build them without deep technical expertise, and addresses the GXP compliance, data confidentiality, and human-centered challenges that will define pharma AI adoption.
Watch the video to accompany this episode here

“Drug candidates that previously would not have been considered feasible — they’re now on the table. Hybrid synthesis is opening the door to peptide drugs you’re going to need in larger quantities.” 
Brian Gregg, CEO of AmbioPharm, has spent his career in the peptide contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) industry — including early work on exenatide, the first approved GLP-1 receptor agonist for Type 2 diabetes. Today, he leads AmbioPharm through a period of significant strategic expansion, anchored by a differentiated capability: hybrid peptide synthesis.
In this episode of the PharmaSource podcast, Brian explains why hybrid synthesis is rapidly becoming the defining manufacturing advantage in the GLP-1 era, how AmbioPharm is building mirror-image facilities in Shanghai and South Carolina to de-risk customer supply chains, and why the company’s dual-continent footprint is an asset.
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“Our on-time-in-full delivery was 30%. In the beer industry, it’s around 99%. That was a big shock.”
When Gijs Vissers joined the pharmaceutical industry, he saw that supply chain operations were often driven by fragmented processes, minimal performance tracking, and cost-focused supplier relationships that created more problems than solutions. Drawing on lessons from the beer industry, where on-time-in-full delivery routinely exceeds 99%, Gijs has spent years transforming pharmaceutical supply chain approaches, achieving employee engagement scores above 80% while dramatically improving supply reliability.
Gijs Vissers, Head of Supply Chain and Procurement at Nordic Pharma, brings over 20 years of supply chain and procurement experience across fast-moving consumer goods, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals, including senior roles at Heineken, Bavaria, and DSM before joining Nordic Pharma as Head of Supply Chain and Procurement. His career trajectory reflects a deliberate shift from commercial functions to operational excellence, driven by his Lean Six Sigma training and a conviction that the industry’s greatest asset is its people, not its processes.
In this episode, Gijs shared his approach to rebuilding pharmaceutical supply chains from the ground up, moving from reactive vendor management to strategic CDMO partnerships anchored in transparency, long-term forecasting, and patient-centric objectives.
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“CDMOs and Biotechs will both die,” warns NKILT Therapeutics CEO as he talks candidly about the funding crisis stalling cell therapy development, predicting widespread consolidation across biotechs and CDMOs unless the industry shifts toward risk-sharing partnership models that align manufacturing economics with capital constraints.
Raphaël Ognar, CEO and co-founder of NKILT Therapeutics, brings 29 years of pharmaceutical and biotech experience spanning marketing, drug development, and corporate strategy at major pharmaceutical companies. After launching a consulting practice focused on early-stage immuno-oncology biotechs, Raphaël co-founded NKILT Therapeutics.
NKILT’s off-the-shelf allogeneic approach (as opposed to patient-specific autologous therapies) targets HLA-G, an immunosuppressive molecule expressed across major cancer types including colorectal, breast, prostate, and kidney cancers, providing access to substantially larger patient populations while improving manufacturing scalability and economics.
His company’s 12-month IND delay exemplifies the systemic pressures that continue to threaten cell therapy innovation, and both sides of the CDMO-biotech relationship.
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