How Determine the Relative Competitiveness Of Companies Providing Microbiome Contract Manufacturing Services?
In order to determine the relative competitiveness of companies engaged in providing microbiome contract manufacturing services, we focused on several relevant parameters, such as service strength (based on company’s experience), product portfolio (scale of operation, type of formulation, type of primary packaging used and number of manufacturing facilities), and number of service(s) offered.
Additionally, the insights on company competitiveness have been presented in the form of a 3-D bubble chart, with the company’s experience (abscissa) on the x-axis and competitiveness (ordinate) on the y-axis.
As per our proprietary scoring criteria, Biose emerged as the most prominent player engaged in this domain. Probiotical, Cerbios-Pharma and UAS Labs (in decreasing order of their respective scores) emerged as other key CMOs offering microbiome-related services. All the aforementioned firms have obtained a higher score than the average score (18.2) of the top 10 players.
Recent development initiatives for the microbiome manufacturing industry
During our research, we identified various recent development initiatives (partnerships and collaborations, mergers and acquisitions and expansions) that have been undertaken in the microbiome manufacturing industry, during the period between 2016 and 2021. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in the number of recent development initiatives undertaken in this domain.
This can be attributed to the fact that microbiome contract manufacturers are continuously investing in their facilities to cater to the growing demand for microbiome-based therapies. Further, research agreements emerged as the most popular (36%) type of partnership model adopted by players engaged in this domain. The high research activity in this domain can be attributed to the efforts of players to further advance the development of their product offerings, across different phases.
The installed global contract manufacturing capacity, spread across various geographies
Microbiome products represent a rapidly growing segment of the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, over 140 microbiome-based, live biotherapeutic products are currently being evaluated in preclinical and clinical studies. Further, close to 70 companies are engaged in the development of these products; of these, 49% players claim to have the required in-house production capabilities.
Microbiome therapeutics’ production process usually needs high capital investment and manufacturing expertise, and hence, several pharmaceutical companies are compelled to outsource their production operations to CMOs that have the required facilities, equipment and trained personnel.
Currently, 62% of the overall microbiome contract manufacturing capacity is installed for commercial operations. The maximum (59%) installed capacity belongs to companies based in Europe; the region has higher number of players having multiple production facilities. This is followed by Asia Pacific (32%) and North America (9%).
