Retained, partner-led search for the leaders who run contract development and manufacturing: CEO and Chief Commercial Officer, COO, Business Development, MSAT and Tech Transfer, Quality, and site leadership. For the CDMO building its bench, and the biotech choosing and governing one.
Source: William Blair, 2024. See our series on the model: Is Our CDMO Industry Model Broken?
A model built for economies of repetition is being run against the diseconomies of fragmentation that arrived with the funding winter. The site that once ran ten clients with four programs each now runs forty clients with one program each: the same program count, four times the methods, bridging studies, and change-control chains. The people who hold that together are the reason the model still works, and hiring them is not a task a generalist search firm is built for. It is a network you have to live in.
CDMO leadership is a market with three sides, and we place across all of them.
The commercial, operational, and quality leaders who move a CDMO from clinical-flexible to commercially disciplined without losing the accommodation that wins clients.
The CMC, Tech Ops, and Quality leaders inside a sponsor who select a CDMO partner and hold them to account. Sponsors carry full regulatory accountability regardless of who manufactures.
Heads of External Manufacturing and sourcing leadership who run a portfolio of contract sites and treat supply security as a lead variable, not a footnote.
A CDMO's commercial leadership decides which programs it wins and at what economics. We run retained searches for Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Business Officer, and VP Business Development roles across contract development and manufacturing, including the cell and gene therapy manufacturing space, where commercial and technical judgment have to sit in the same leader.
Recent CDMO commercial and business-development placements include:
Beyond commercial, Phase 3 has placed leadership across the CDMO floor, from General Manager and Site Head to VP Process Development, Global VP Project Management, MSAT, and Quality, at AGC Biologics, Nitto Avecia, KBI Biopharma, Matica Biotechnology, Tanvex / Bora Biologics, and TriLink / Maravai.
At Matica Biotechnology, a cell and gene therapy CDMO, Phase 3 placed the technical C-suite in full: the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Manufacturing Officer.
Every CDMO search begins with a diagnostic: what the business actually is, where it needs to go, and where the board and management disagree about what the role requires. We assess candidates against the operational reality, not a title, whether the seat is commercial discipline, an audit floor under load, or a tech-transfer engine. Retained, partner-led, and diagnostic-first, in a leadership network we live in day to day.
CEO and President, COO and SVP Operations, VP Business Development and Commercial, VP MSAT and Technology Transfer, VP and Head of Quality (CQO), Site Head and General Manager, and program management leadership.
The CDMO model is straining under fragmentation, and the leaders who can hold commercial discipline and operational quality through it are rare. Generalist search misses them because it does not live in the contract-manufacturing network.
Yes. The CMC, Technical Operations, and Quality leaders who select and govern a CDMO partner are core to our practice, alongside the leadership we place inside CDMOs.
Thirty minutes. A structured read on the role. We tell you whether search is the right product, whether the brief reflects the company you are actually inheriting, and whether the leadership architecture sits where it needs to be for your next capital event.
