As one of the fastest growing areas in the pharmaceutical industry, the demand for finished dosage formulations is having an impact on several aspects of the Contract Manufacturing Organization (CMO) industries.

In order to ensure a piece of the finished dosage formulations (FDF) market share, CMOs have adjusted their service offerings, mainly to broaden their capabilities. The largest CMOs have more dosage forms and will typically have facilities on multiple continents so they can both operate on a more global basis and can service more of the pipeline that they could in the past.

Another trend in the industry is that more CMOs are offering both finished dosage form and the active ingredient - making them full-service providers. In this model a company can take its molecule to a supplier where its API process is scaled-up and converted to the dosage form at a single manufacturing organization. This is a relatively recent development in the industry, which is mainly due to increased reliability, quality, and sophisticated depth of capability of the CMO industry today.

The demand for FDFs has a big effect on consolidation among CMOs, as much of the industry’s mergers and acquisitions activity is being driven by companies looking to acquire technologies to expand their capabilities to address the issue. Recent M&A have helped expand the capabilities of companies in formulation development to include specialist pre-formulation, formulation prototyping and formulation development services. Sometimes, combining device capabilities with a contract manufacturing capability can bring a full-service device and filling offering to the market.