Leading a State Owned CDMO

Raman Sehgal (0:09)

Hey, guys and girls, welcome back to Molecule to Market where we go inside the outsourcing space of Pharma Services and Pharma Tools 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 Erik Haeffler, who is the CEO at APL.

Erik and I have actually known each other for a long time as you'll hear at the start of this episode of Paths Crossed many years ago at Recipharm, when I was working with Recipharm as part of an engagement at remarketing and worked very closely with him on some projects and got on very well with him.

It's been great to watch his career at Recipharm, but then on to a fantastic CEO role that he does at APL now. Actually, when he joined APL, I reached out to him and asked him if he wanted to come on the podcast. He said he had some work to do before he wanted to do that, and as you'll hear today, that's exactly what he's been up to. And super interesting as well because, as you can probably tell by the title, APL is different to your average pharma services company, especially CDMOs, because it's actually state-owned by the Swedish government, which brings its own complexities, as you'll hear about today. But a fascinating kind of insight into how that works as well. A bit of background on Erik. He leads APL, a Swedish pharma manufacturing company of 600 people across five sites. Being a state-owned enterprise with a public policy assignment, APL is a bit of an odd bird on the pharma market. This is their word, it's not mine. His state assignment compromises pharmacy compounding for the Swedish market, where APL has approximately 80% market share and also a formal preparedness mission for supply chain in peacetime crisis and war. APL is also a fully commercial CDMO with a range of capabilities focusing on a segment that fits into the company's origin in compounding. Erik himself has more than 30 years in the pharma industry with senior roles at AstraZeneca, Meda and Recipharm. He is also a board member at Nanologica. Greg, I suggest you connect with him on LinkedIn. One thing to quickly add is I will also be attending CDMO Live Americas, which is on October 21st in my beloved Boston, one of my favorite cities in the world. Super exciting for the CDMO Live team. This is their first ever event in North America. It's happening at the Sheridan Copey Place, which I believe is in Back Bay in Boston. So bringing together that same formula that has worked really, really well for the guys across in Europe for the event in Rotterdam, is also going to be transplanted to the event in Boston. Super exciting, and I'm very proud to be once again, hosting a panel, which will be on the 20th of October. I'm not sure which panel I'm going to be doing, but I suspect it will be something related to outsourcing and external outsourcing. As per usual, with these guys, there are some amazing outsourcing experts and speakers and influencers that will be at the event. So yeah, looking forward, I think it's going to be 400 or 500 people there. So a nice size in terms of getting to speak to lots of people there and meeting some new people and they've got their partner match thing as well, which is fantastic and it is a way for the vendors to meet potential buyers and drug sponsors in external manufacturing in CMC, which is super exciting. So if you can make the event, go to the CDMO Live website and I'm sure you can navigate your way to register there and I'll see you guys at the show in Boston. As always, thanks so much for listening and if you like today's show, please leave us a kind rating or share it with a colleague. If you've been putting that off for a while, I think today might be today.

Enjoy the 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 info delivery record. If you want to feel more confident about your CDMO, then I suggest you head to boracdmo.com.