From Polish Biosimilars to Building a Biologics CDMO

Raman Sehgal (0:09)

Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Molecule to Market, where we go inside the outsourcing space of pharma and bio pharma services, covering every stage of the global drug development and commercialization life cycle. I am your host, Raman Sehgal, and in today's episode, I'll be speaking about the pharma and bio pharma ecosystem with Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld.

Hopefully, I pronounced Adriana's name correctly, and she was kind enough to give me a few tips in advance. So yeah, thank you to Adriana, and what a fantastic guest we have on the show. Someone I actually met in person very, very recently as well. A real kind of up and coming star of the CDMO space. So let me tell you a bit about my guest today. Adriana is the CEO of Rezon Bio, where she leads the company's strategy operations and partnerships across biologics, development and manufacturing. With more than 20 years of experience in the biotechnology field, she specializes in recombinant proteins, in purification and biosimilars. Previously, she held senior roles at Polpharma Biologics, including COO and Site Head, where she helped support the transition to commercial scale manufacturing and contributed to FDA and EMA approvals. Adriana holds a PhD from the University of Wrocław and an Executive MBA from IMD, combining deep technical expertise with strategic relationship. And what isn't in her biog, which comes across in her interview today, is just her kind of focus on purpose and making medicines for patients. And a real commitment to the Polish bio pharma scene, which you'll hear in today's interview. A great guest and something that you are gonna enjoy. Thanks as always for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and rate and enjoy today's show.

This episode is brought to you by Bora Pharmaceuticals. I've got a real soft spot for Bora. I first met Bobby Sheng, CEO, back in 2017, and it's been amazing to watch the business grow and expand to become truly top tier global CDMO. Bobby was in fact one of our first ever guests on Molecule to Market, a great, great guy. Bora now supports many of the biggest pharma companies across the globe. Bora has become known as the CDMO that brings a genuine partnership to clients, as shown through their shared risk promise, their white glove service and their peerless on time in full delivery record. If you want to feel more confident about your CDMO, then I suggest you head to boracdmo.com.

Hey Adriana, welcome to Molecule to Market.

Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld (2:55)

Thank you very much for the invitation. Welcome everyone.

Raman Sehgal (2:58)

Thank you. And we got to meet each other last week at CPHI, albeit briefly. So thank you for coming to the event that I hosted. And it was great to meet you in person. It's not always the case with Molecule to Market that I get to meet the guests in advance of the interview. So it was lovely to meet you in person. And yeah, I'm sure you can share lots in today's interview about the general pulse of the sector from your time in Milan as well. So yeah, excited to have this conversation. And let's maybe start Adriana with your backstory. So obviously you've had a pretty extensive career in the kind of pharma space and more recently, of course, the CDMO space. So I'd love you maybe just to talk about your kind of journey into the sector. And then I know you did a few roles before you ended up, you know, working for what became Rezon Bio.

Adriana Kiedzierska-Mencfeld (3:51)

Thank you very much. It was really a pleasure to meet you also in person during the panel. And by the way, the panel was really excellent. Thank you. So it was a very good start of the CPHI in Milan. So coming back to my story, maybe I will start from that. I never planned to become a CEO. So I started as a scientist, fascinated by biotechnology. What kept me in the industry for more than 20 years was not the title. But the belief that biologics, medicine should be accessible for more patients. And this was also connected with my private story, with my brother getting sick and having access to the biologics medicine. When I entered biotechnology, Poland's biologics industry was still in early stage. I can even say that it was in pond stage. Many talented people believe that they need to leave Poland to pursue ambitious careers. I made the different choice. The reasons was two, one of the private what I mentioned before, but the second one equally important was that I wanted to help to build something that did not exist in our country on that time. So I love the challenges and my journey was full of challenges over the time.