Patient centricity to 'change CDMO business internally': Piramal

Stuart Needleman, the chief commercial officer of Piramal, was recently also appointed the newly-established title of the chief patient centricity officer, as part of the company’s attempt to “put the patient first and open up to a sustained engagement,”​ the executive said during a panel discussion at CPhI Worldwide this week in Frankfurt.

Steps in this direction, according to Needleman, are part of a ‘progressive trend’ across the industry, including a shift toward personalized medicine. 

This trend “means a new mindset and culture” ​for Piramal regarding the ‘fundamental’ objective of reducing the burden of disease and how product development and manufacture are approached.

“Initially, pharmaceutical companies are our customers, but at the end of the day, the customer is the patient. So, we have transformed the mindset to actually consider the patient as [the person] who ultimately pays us, even from a CDMO perspective,”​ Needleman noted.

Once the spotlight is put on the patient, Needleman explained that the way the contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) operates, ‘changes internally.’ 

“It’s an internal mindset to make sure that you don’t go home until the job is done, and we think that this will resonate with our customers, as well as with the person paying the bill,”​ he added.

According to Piramal’s executive, this ‘mindset shift’ is something that will soon also be seen around the rest of the CDMO space.  

Moreover, under the same mindset, Piramal is having patients visiting the company, meeting with the employees and executives and talking about their journey and experiences with the drugs produced by the company. 

This process is expected to “make a difference in how Piramal behaves as an organisation, boost research, and motivate the workers,” ​Needleman added.

Finally, the executive also highlighted the need to sufficiently inform the patients, because, in the foreseeable future, it will be them that will make the decisions about their treatments and, ultimately, about how the market evolves.