Q&A: Inside Cambrex’s expansion, strategic focus in 2025 and beyond

Cambrex has been busy in the latter half of 2025 strengthening its core capabilities across the drug lifecycle, reinforcing its position as a global player in the contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) space.

In August, Cambrex announced the expansion of its peptide manufacturing capabilities at the company’s active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) facility in Waltham, Massachusetts. More recently, the CDMO unveiled a $120 million investment to expand API manufacturing and strengthen U.S. drug supply resilience, which will support a 40% increase in the Charles City, Iowa site’s large-scale manufacturing capacity — reaching nearly one million liters, according to the company.

On the heels of these capital expenditures, we spoke with Cambrex CEO Thomas Loewald to learn how the company is positioning itself amid shifting global supply chain expectations, burgeoning demand for complex small molecule therapeutics, and a rapidly evolving CDMO landscape. Loewald outlined the significance of Cambrex’s recent investments, how customers’ needs are changing, and what’s ahead in 2026 and beyond.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

Andy Lundin: What are major trends you see shaping the CDMO industry?

Thomas Loewald: In our space, we’re seeing several shifts, like the fluctuation of biotech funding and increased demand for complex molecule development. But the big one for us is the localization of supply chains, and customers’ concerns about supply chain security. 

This shift started back during COVID, as a supply chain security concern, and now we are seeing the impacts from the BIOSECURE Act, tariffs, and Most-Favored-Nation pharmaceutical pricing. So, all of those things have yielded a really strong interest by our customers to make sure that, for U.S. products, they have U.S.-based development and manufacturing supply.

The trend also applies to Europe to a certain extent, where we’re also well positioned. We see consistent demand to establish manufacturing in Western Europe for regional supply.

One of the reasons that we have such strong confidence in increasing our capacity in the U.S. at a site like Charles City, Iowa — which is our largest — is because of this very strong demand we’re seeing from customers for all the reasons I just mentioned.

As for other trends, we’ve continued to see our customers impacted by fluctuations in biotech funding, which has gone up and down over the last few years, especially for early phase clinical programs. The first half of 2025 was fairly soft but we saw a nice rebound in Q3, potentially because of the prospect of lower interest rates. We see this affecting small and middle-sized biotech customers more than the large pharma. 

Typically for Phase II or Phase III programs, you don’t see any impact. The folks who have made an investment are going to continue with that investment, and it’s less dependent upon the overall biotech funding environment.

Another point I want to mention is increased demand for complex small molecule development, which has driven our investments in this area over the past three years. We’re helping to develop more complex synthetics, which we’re seeing as a high-growth rate area. That means ADCs, peptides, oligos, and other complex modalities. We see those related therapeutic areas growing at a fairly fast clip.

What are Cambrex’s core strengths and how do they align with the needs of the pharma and biotech companies?

Loewald: As a company with 45 years of experience developing small molecules, our greatest strength has been the ability to stay at the forefront of innovation in chemistry and process development. Small molecule development has existed for over a century, but innovation in process development — like flow chemistry, biocatalysis, directed evolution, liquid phase peptide synthesis and optimization of highly potent APIs — is what sets us apart. And when you have advanced capabilities, combined with a science-first approach, we can deliver scalable, environmentally sustainable manufacturing solutions with lower cost of goods. And we manage our EU and U.S.-based network to achieve that goal.   

If you think about sites in our network, a site like one we have in Longmont, Colorado can do pre-clinical and then first-in-human scale API development. Then, as a compound goes into Phase I or Phase II we have a site in High Point, North Carolina that really specializes in that scaling. Then, if the molecule progresses, our customers will want the ability to do large-scale manufacturing.

Sites like Charles City, Iowa, Karlskoga, Sweden, or our site in Milan, Italy have that large-scale commercial capacity. We have this unique set of capabilities, we operate as a network and continue to expand capacity. There are also specialized capabilities that the market finds highly desirable. Things like our franchise in controlled substances and high potency, as well as our continuous flow technology — which is increasingly in demand. 

Then, looking at the big market trends, there is huge demand for peptide-based GLP-1s. In an injectable form, you need a certain amount of API, but when an oral solid option becomes available, I think everybody hopes for at some point, the amount of API you need is significantly expanded. The whole market is understanding that they’re going to need a lot more API as these therapies progress, and the current solid-phase synthesis approach to peptide manufacturing simply does not have the capacity to serve the market that we’re going to see.

With liquid phase technology, we can use our current manufacturing network. Our reactors today, which make traditional small molecules, can make liquid phase peptides day-in and day-out as well. We can apply this big capacity we’ve got in the U.S. and Europe to a very fast-growing demand for peptide API, as it starts to transition into liquid phase.

Regarding API development, can you speak to the vulnerabilities associated with key starting material (KSM) sourcing?

Loewald: Our customers care about where the API is being manufactured, but they are cognizant of the supply chain for API, of course. Regarding intermediates and key starting materials, there is a heightened focus on where those are coming from and — ideally — producing as many of those precursors to the final API in the U.S. and in Western Europe. 

Five or six years ago we probably wouldn’t have been a part of the conversation, but we’re seeing an increase in demand for those precursor chemicals. When we work on process development early in clinical trials, we’re able to strategize and optimize the sourcing or production of those key starting materials. So, we’ll quote the API, but we’ll also quote the production of the registered starting materials as well in our network to simplify the supply chain.

There’s been a lot of industry discussion around onshoring, especially in the context of tariffs and related policy shifts. To what extent do you view the current push toward onshoring as a product of this moment in time and how is your organization adapting to these evolving conditions?

Loewald: Our pharmaceutical and biotech customers need to be confident in the reliability of supply. Because of the items that we previously discussed — the BIOSECURE Act, tariffs, Most-Favored-Nation pricing — they have a very heightened sensitivity to making sure they’re going to be able to produce their molecules and their therapies without any disruption.

It is an important move for innovators to have U.S. and Western European production sources built into their outsourcing strategies. And we do not anticipate this being a short-term phenomenon. Whether it’s for production or for sourcing — it’s a multi-year commitment that they’re making. 

That gives us the confidence to continue to add capacity as announced, because we’re looking at this as a three- to five-year commitment and not a one- to two-year phenomenon. Lead times are too long, and the development timelines require that you work in five-plus-year increments.

How has Cambrex expanded its networking capabilities and what differentiates its sites from the U.S. and Europe?

Loewald: The full network and workstreams span the U.S. and Europe, with development and large-scale manufacturing sites in both regions. Unlike a lot of CDMOs, our sites never work in silos, because we think about supporting our customers in this way: they come to us with a compound that they want to develop, and we look at how the whole network can support that customer. We use different sites and different technologies in different parts of our network to support the customer. It’s very common for us to utilize a vast majority of the network to support an individual customer’s program. 

When we think about investing, it’s not just square footage. We invest in each of the sites, the teams and the technologies that we see are in demand. For example, we have continuous flow in multiple sites in the network, because we need to be able to do that on a development-scale and in a large-capacity setting. The same goes with liquid phase peptides synthesis. We do our process development work at our Snapdragon facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, but any commercial production would happen at one of our larger sites.

We’ve also made acquisitions for this space — Snapdragon being the one of them. They’re a specialist in very difficult, complex chemistry process development. Our customers — especially early in the development of their molecules, need that kind of problem-solving and technical work before they can scale their drug up.

We have spent about $200 million over the last five years across our network in capacity expansion and will likely spend a similar amount of money over the next five years to continue to expand across the whole network.

Where is Cambrex focusing its investments to support further growth? How is the company considering AI in the future?

Loewald: In addition to the investment we made at Charles City, we’ll continue to make announcements about the other sites in the network — on top of what we’ve done  the last five years. 

From an artificial intelligence standpoint, we look at AI as a useful tool to expedite development and automating experimentation. You can automate experiments in a way you couldn’t do before by gathering a tremendous amount of data and optimizing process development in real-time, which is going to help our customers speed up the development cycle. 

Then, from a greener standpoint, AI can optimize processes to reduce the use of solvents as well as the environmental impact in general. We are applying that approach to our development-phase work at our facilities across the network.

Do you have any additional insight to share regarding Cambrex’s approach to sustainability and the adoption of green technologies?

Loewald: We’ve been doing this for a long time. We started our sustainability program back in 2018, and in our first five years our goal was to reduce greenhouse emissions. We reduced them by about 20% in scope one and scope two, and now we’re focused on the next set of metrics looking toward 2030.

We’ve established a new set of goals. In this case, a 50% reduction in scope one and scope two emissions and then starting to hit scope three emissions as well. We have a 42% reduction in scope three targeted for 2030, compared to the 2020 baseline. We have the big picture goals outlined and our path to get there.

Our large sites are all audited by key organizations in this space. EcoVadis is an organization that audits our sites and gives us scores on our sustainability and provides a basis to continue to improve them.

We can make an impact in a lot of different ways, and one is our source of energy. At our Iowa site, almost 90% of our energy comes from renewable wind power, as an example, which is the benefit of being in Iowa; there are a lot of windmills out there. We also look at reducing emissions — whether it’s in landfill incineration or solvent usage — which is especially important as an API manufacturer. 

Then, on top of that, you have what we call green chemistry. How do you redefine the actual chemistry process itself as being greener? We’re excited about liquid phase peptide synthesis because it allows traditional peptides to be made using a liquid phase approach rather than solid phase. This approach uses ten times less solvent, leading to lower costs and a much smaller environmental impact. That’s a key reason our customers are gravitating toward this technology, especially as peptide therapies are expanded to treat larger patient populations and additional indications.