Agilent’s Biovectra CDMO business exceeds Q2 guidance, expects sequential dip in Q3

Less than nine months after Agilent Technologies completed its $925 million acquisition of Biovectra, a Canadian contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), the investment appears to be starting to pay off.

“While not yet part of core growth, our Biovectra business performed well, exceeding guidance,” Agilent CEO Padraig McDonnell told analysts on the company’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call on Wednesday.

McDonnell contends that Biovectra’s capabilities are in the “sweet spot” of GLP-1s and complex chemistries, with strong medium- and long-term growth potential as the company looks to target these “important” therapeutic areas.

Overall, McDonnell said Agilent is “really pleased” by the progress in its CDMO business, with high single-digit growth in Q2 from its Nucleic Acid Solutions Division (NASD) — which has two cGMP facilities in Boulder and Frederick, Colorado — and growth in the “high teens” from Biovectra. He noted that NASD was a “standout” in the quarter and the company is looking forward to double-digit growth from NASD in the second half of 2025.

Simon May, president of Agilent’s Life Sciences & Diagnostics Markets Group, commented that he’s confident in NASD’s projected growth for the rest of the year and that Agilent has seen some early commercial programs in the NASD business progress.

“We’re now starting to see the revenue mix there evolve more from 50-50 towards 60-40 in favor of commercial,” May said. “We think that bodes well for the future.”

Looking over the long term at the combined capabilities of Biovectra and NASD, he said Agilent is excited about the opportunities in advanced therapeutic modalities, particularly areas such as oligonucleotides and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). “Bioconjugation generally is a really high growth area where we’ve got real strong capability in Biovectra,” May said.

At the TD Cowen Annual Health Care Conference in March, McDonnell said Biovectra’s capabilities mesh well with Agilent’s CDMO specialization in oligonucleotides and CRISPR therapeutics by expanding its portfolio of services with sterile fill-finish and rapidly growing modalities such as ADCs and GLP-1s.

With the acquisition of Biovectra, Agilent acquired “state-of-the-art” sterile fill-finish capabilities at Biovectra’s Prince Edward Island, Canada site — as well as microbial fermentation competencies — providing a footprint in peptide therapeutics and GLP-1s specifically for clinical-to-commercial scale production.

However, McDonnell also told the TD Cowen conference that there was “a lot of work” bringing Biovectra “up to the same standards” as Agilent’s NASD business.

“When you acquire a new company and you have a CDMO capability within NASD, you have to bring it up to the same standards — so there was a lot of work there in the first quarter, which really I think created a little bit of softness,” McDonnell told the TD Cowen conference.       

In February, Agilent reported that Biovectra brought in $26 million in Q1 sales, slightly lower than expected. May told analysts at the time that “we were slightly soft on revenue” in Q1, as the company brought certain aspects of Biovectra’s operations “up to the Agilent/NASD standards” in terms of process and quality. 

On Wednesday, May told analysts BioVectra has made some “really noticeable” progress, including its GLP-1 manufacturing programs which “saw a successful scale up” as well as process efficiency gains which are “now beginning to become a pretty meaningful contributor to the CDMO business overall.”

However, May cautioned that Agilent’s CDMO business is “lumpy” and “will continue to be lumpy” with Biovectra expected to see a “sequential dip in the third quarter” with some planned equipment shutdowns. “As those come online again, which we anticipate in Q4 provided that all goes to plan, then I think we’ll be back to firing on all cylinders,” he added.

When it comes to the potential impact of tariffs on Agilent’s CDMO business, McDonald said the company so far hasn’t seen any impact, despite President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs on Canada, among other countries. May added that Agilent is watching “very closely” the developing geopolitical trade tensions.