The CSO Staying Ahead of the CDMO Curve

Raman Sehgal (0:10)

Hey, and 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 lifecycle. I am your host, Raman Sehgal, and in today's episode, I'll be speaking about the pharma and biopharma ecosystem with Stefan Randl, who is the Chief Scientific Officer at Siegfried. What a tremendous guest he is, really, really interesting guy, fantastic career path, and now carries a very, very big role at a very, very large CDMO.

A bit of background about Stefan, he joined Siegfried in January 2025 as CSO, and prior to that, he spent 16 years at Evonik, where he held various leadership positions in several regions, most recently as VP of Innovation Management and Health Care based in Frankfurt, Germany, and as VP of Drug Substance based in Indiana in the US. He also headed Sales & Services for Health Care in Asia based in Tokyo, which we all get into today during the conversation.

He holds a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the, I'm going to absolutely butcher this name and I'll have a go, Technische Universität Berlin. He is a German citizen, tremendous guy, very, very smart and astute, and great personality as well, I have to say.

I'm really glad you have tuned in for this episode. I've actually written a memoir about my time with Stefan, which you can find on the Molecule to Market pod website. 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 Coby 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna be four or 500 people there. So a nice size in terms of getting to speak to lots of people there and yeah, 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. Thanks as always for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and rate wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoyed 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 borastdmo.com. Hey Stefan, welcome so much to Molecule to Market, my friend.

Stefan Randl (4:19)

Hello Raman, thanks for having me. Looking forward to the discussion.

Raman Sehgal (4:23)

Well, it's hard to get your time with you, Stefan. I'm going to tell you that you are a very, very busy man. So I'm so grateful that you've been able to carve some time on this beautiful Friday afternoon to be here. And I'm so excited to share your story with our audience. You've had quite a journey in the last kind of 15, 20 years or so. So that's maybe a good place to start Stefan. Maybe give our listener a bit of the backstory in terms of your journey kind of in to the sector. And I suppose how it's developed and evolved and how you ultimately ended up where you are at Siegfried.