Lupin Manufacturing Solutions targets long-term growth as new CDMO with pharma roots

Building a new contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) business is never easy — even for a global pharmaceutical company like India-headquartered Lupin Limited with 15 manufacturing sites and products distributed in over 100 markets.

Two years ago, Lupin tapped Abdelaziz Toumi as CEO of its new wholly owned CDMO subsidiary — Lupin Manufacturing Solutions (LMS) — leveraging his more than two decades of experience with leadership positions at Bayer, Catalent, KBI Biopharma, Lonza, and Merck.

From the start, Toumi’s job was to create a customer-facing organization with an external service mindset as a trusted partner, as opposed to Lupin’s internal product-based focus.

“The service we are offering is different,” Toumi told Pharma Manufacturing. “We are switching from a product to a service organization. 2025 was a pivotal year by recruiting senior leadership that is complete now with veterans in the CDMO industry.”

Of course, it helps that Lupin is an established specialty generic company in multiple therapy areas in the United States and is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the U.S. by prescriptions, according to Toumi. At the same time, he noted that LMS is strengthening its own CDMO and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) manufacturing capabilities and capacities to better serve customers.  

In November 2025, LMS commissioned a dedicated oncology block at its Vizag, India facility, including a new high-containment unit designed to boost the CDMO’s end-to-end capabilities for high-potent potent APIs and support customers from preclinical research to commercial manufacturing. The new 4,270-square-meter facility houses 20 reactors, from 250L to 2000L, with more than 20 isolators and advanced containment systems.

Toumi described Vizag as one of LMS’ newest facilities — about 10 years old — which the CDMO inherited from Lupin’s manufacturing network. The oncology site in southeastern India was “never utilized” due to a strategic shift in strategy by the parent company.

Lupin has also transferred its R&D team to LMS, which includes more than 200 scientists and over 20 labs. With global drug development increasingly characterized by molecular complexity, the CDMO is investing in artificial intelligence and flow chemistry, according to Toumi.  

“We are building an organization for the long term — this is not a sprint, this is really a marathon,” Toumi said. “It’s about building the right capabilities, repositioning, and creating awareness of our CDMO business.”

Targeting ADCs and peptides

LMS has positioned itself as a leading manufacturer of APIs and a global CDMO offering standalone and integrated services across drug substances, complex chemistry, drug product, and advanced modalities, including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and peptides. Among its approved capital expenditures, Toumi said the company has budgeted in a “phased approach” for an ADC center in Vizag to strengthen its high-potent payload, linker, and bioconjugation capabilities.

“We’re interested in areas where we can build competitive advantages in technology and know-how which will be more sustainable for the future,” he emphasized. “We picked the peptide segment because it’s growing very fast and we can differentiate compared to other Chinese and Indian players.”    

To scale its peptide building-blocks platform, LMS in early 2026 announced the expansion of the CDMO’s manufacturing facility in Dabhasa, India. The expanded infrastructure, which Toumi said will be up and running in 2027, includes dedicated peptide production capacity across two additional specialized units. 

In December 2025, LMS also announced a long-term strategic alliance with PolyPeptide Group, a Switzerland-based CDMO specializing in peptide APIs. The collaboration is meant to integrate procurement and supply planning to support growing commercial demand for peptide therapeutics, including metabolic disease treatments such as GLP-1s.

Toumi said the multi-year deal is the first CDMO agreement for LMS, with the company supplying critical building blocks for large-scale peptide manufacturing and slated to deliver the initial batches to PolyPeptide Group this summer.

“We spent a lot of time defining the right partner we want to work with,” he added, noting that PolyPeptide Group is “one of the largest peptide manufacturers in the world.”