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Peter DeYoung, CEO of Piramal Pharma, sat down with Onyx for a feature-length interview.
Could you share a bit about your career journey and how you came to lead Piramal Pharma?
Absolutely. I'm an engineer by training, having graduated from a computer science and engineering program in the US during the dotcom boom-turned-bust era. I joined a consulting firm and, somewhat accidentally, ventured into healthcare through my first project—that was the kind of client work available then. I fell in love with the industry and never left.
I spent several years consulting in healthcare and pharma, had a brief stint living in Geneva working for the World Economic Forum, and then did more consulting. Eventually, I moved to India on what I called a one-year trial—15 years ago. After a couple of years in private equity, where I learned how investors look at businesses, I realized I most enjoyed operations and running a business. This led me to Piramal Pharma, where I’ve held various roles. I enjoy the operational role because it combines strategic thinking from consulting and the perspective from investing, but focuses on making tangible impacts for patients. It's a lot easier to theorize; it's a lot harder to do. And I find the operating role the most exciting.
Can you provide an overview of Piramal Pharma’s products and services, and your role in them?
Certainly. I lead our global pharma business, which comprises two main divisions: Piramal Pharma Solutions, our Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO), and Piramal Critical Care, our complex hospital generics business. Additionally, we have a consumer health division focused on the Indian market.
In Pharma Solutions, we handle drug substance and drug product development across both Eastern and Western markets, serving a range from emerging biopharma to large pharmaceutical companies, covering the entire lifecycle from discovery to commercial-scale manufacturing and late-stage management.
In Piramal Critical Care, we're providing specialized hospital products like inhalation anesthetics, injectable pain therapies, intrathecal treatments, and other specialty pharmaceuticals, largely to hospitals and institutions. Our biggest markets are North America, Europe, and Japan, but we serve customers globally in both regulated and unregulated markets.
Regarding the Pharma Solutions side, who are your ideal customers? Who finds the most benefit from your services?
We've been transitioning to focus more on innovator clients. Historically, we were more involved in off-patent products and lifecycle management, but now over half of our sales are from innovator clients—that's now the largest and most rapidly growing part of our business. We're helping people with on-patent products achieve their goals with patients.
We offer a lot of differentiated services—things not everyone can provide—and these are growing much faster than our overall portfolio. These include antibody-drug conjugations, highly-potent APIs, sterile fill-finish with containment, hormones, liquids, creams, ointments, and peptides. There's significant demand for these specialized services.
We also provide integrated services where clients seek speed, simplicity, unified program management, and single-point accountability by combining multiple offerings—drug substance side, drug product side, or both. Clients look for a single leader who can orchestrate everything and hold that one partner accountable, reducing the need to manage multiple partners.
Many of our clients want to engage with us across multiple sites. Of our top 20 customers, 16 are working with us across two or more of our locations. They're leveraging our global network in India and the West, which demonstrates the power of our integrated geographical presence and makes us increasingly relevant to their needs.
Additionally, our Science Collective ensures we deliver top-tier scientific leadership alongside our services. These technical experts are renowned as leaders in their respective fields. They work closely with our clients to bring the right scientific insights to our collaborations, setting us apart in the CDMO space.
What challenges have you faced in shifting focus towards innovator clients?
One major challenge was upgrading our capabilities through the Science Collective to support clients moving through various development phases—from discovery to commercial launch. Clients are navigating their own journeys to ensure their CMC packages are appropriate for each phase, which requires us to advise on trade-offs and risk management.
Different clients have varying approaches—some want extensive upfront work due to their strategy, while others prioritize rapid progression to fundraising milestones. Understanding and aligning with their strategies has been crucial. Enhancing our scientific capabilities allows us to partner effectively and support their scaling efforts for patient benefit.
Upscaling brings significant costs. How do you balance these with projected earnings?
We invest in line with our performance, balancing OPEX and CAPEX based on demand and strategic opportunities. Recently, we completed a major capital campaign and outlined our future plans at an investor day.
Key investments include expanding our conjugation capabilities at our Grangemouth, UK site, enhancing potent API capacities in Aurora, Ontario, and Riverview, Michigan, and upgrading our peptide and analytical facilities in India. We’re also expanding our sterile fill-finish facility in Kentucky.
These investments are driven by customer demand, as gathered through our biannual customer advisory board meetings. We assess macro market opportunities to decide where to invest, ensuring alignment with our strengths in both Eastern and Western markets and our specialized service offerings.
You mentioned highly-potent APIs. What determines an API’s potency?
API potency is primarily about operator safety. Highly-potent APIs require more stringent containment and safety measures to protect operators from exposure. We categorize APIs into different Occupational Exposure Band (OEB) levels. For example, in our Kentucky facility, we have a fully containment-oriented approach that allows us to handle highly-potent fill-finish processes, while our Riverview facility can manage up to OEB 5 due to our advanced containment investments.
What factors do you consider when deciding where to expand?
Customer needs drive our expansion decisions. We use insights from our customer advisory board and market research to identify demand areas. Typically, we expand our existing facilities—we have 15 across the East and West. Brownfield expansions with customers who already work with us and want to grow are the safest bets.
In some cases, we look at gaps and have added sites to our network—13 of our 15 sites were acquired. When we see a gap and realize we need a particular offering, we pursue M&A. We consider payback periods, strategic fit, and whether the combined value is greater together than apart.
Have there been any key technologies recently important for CDMOs?
Yes, several trends are shaping our investments. There's a supply-demand mismatch for fill-finish services, partly due to industry consolidations and capacity absorption by GLP-1 therapies, prompting us to expand our Kentucky site.
Another trend is the industry's focus on ADCs as a therapeutic category. Specific technology is needed to make them. We've invested in everything from the map to the linker-payload, conjugation, and fill-finish—we can offer the whole package in an integrated way. We're seeing significant interest there.
We're also seeing general interest in peptides due to recent successes, so we've expanded our peptide capabilities accordingly. Additionally, geopolitical factors are driving a trend towards "friend-shoring," where companies prefer sourcing from allied regions like the US, North America, India, and the UK to mitigate geopolitical risks. We’re increasing our supply capabilities in these regions to align with this trend.
What are Piramal Pharma’s main goals and milestones for 2025?
At our recent investor day, we outlined our vision to become a $2 billion company focused on pharma, health, and wellness, and to lead in our operational areas by 2030.
Within Pharma Solutions, our goal is to emerge as a fast-growing, innovation-focused integrated CDMO. We aim to leverage our scientific excellence and global network to deliver value solutions to our customers and their patients. We're very patient-centric and would like to double our business.
Our financial goals are encapsulated in "3-2-1": triple our EBITDA, double our revenue, and achieve EBITDA levels of 1x. These ambitious targets reflect our confidence in our strategy and our commitment to becoming a compelling force in the industry.
Doubling your revenue is ambitious. What strategies will help you achieve this?
Our strategies center on innovation, delivering scientific expertise to customers, offering integrated solutions, and encouraging customers to expand their engagements with us. By combining our Eastern and Western capabilities in substance and product development, we enhance our credibility and relevance. Last year, we achieved 19% year-on-year growth, and this year, we’ve seen 18% growth in the first quarter. These figures demonstrate that clients trust us with their key programs, validating our strategy.
Additionally, our on-patent commercial revenue doubled this year, showing that as we support clients through development to launch, we grow alongside them, successfully meeting patient needs.
Finally, what is your secret to leading a successful team and fostering a positive culture?
We start with the fundamentals—our purpose of "doing well and doing good," and our core values of knowledge, care, action, and impact. These are embedded in our daily actions and culture. We’ve defined three cultural priorities: patient, customer, and consumer centricity; seamless collaboration; and empowered accountability.
For example, during Patient Safety Week, we invited patients from our clients to share their journeys with our employees. This connects our team’s work directly to patient outcomes, reinforcing the importance of quality, safety, and timeliness in everything we do. These initiatives help us deliver on our promises to all stakeholders—patients, employees, and investors—by making our purpose and values tangible and real in everyday operations.
