Newsmakers: Catalent

n August, Catalent Pharma Solutions announced that it was launching a new business unit: Development & Clinical Services. I was intrigued by the move, given the dynamics of the development industry, so I spoke with the new unit’s group president, Scott Houlton, about it.

Mr. Houlton previously worked as chief operating officer of Aptuit. It’ll be interesting to see how his experience in the development sphere informs his perspective on his new role, spearheading development services at a large CMO like Catalent. —GYR

Contract Pharma: What’s the rationale for launching the new Development & Clinical Services segment?

Scott Houlton: The premise is to give our development and clinical services a greater emphasis and focus within the larger Catalent organization. These services were part of larger segments that also included commercial operations. What we want to do with this new segment is really focus on the different customer within our sponsor companies. That is, the person who is involved in the development cycle of a product. This is often a different customer than the one who we talk to for the commercial stage of the product. We want to make sure we are aligned with how our customers are aligned, and how they utilize our services.

Within the pharma companies, the decision-makers who are placing the work for the various development services are from different departments. It gives us greater focus to put together these services to meet our customer needs in a bundled way so we are coordinated in these service offerings.

CP: Are you positioning the new segment as a feeder toward commercial operations or is it meant to be a standalone business?

SH: In an ideal world, we’d love it if everything we worked on in the development space fed into our commercial operations. But in reality, there’s a certain amount of that work that will, and some that won’t. There’s a time gap between development work and approval for commercial work. We want to make sure we’re aligned appropriately for each segment of work and can be responsive to those needs. If we can, we’d definitely like to offer our commercial services to all of our development customers. We certainly have unique technologies that will help us in developing products and commercializing them. We intend to run this segment as a business unit within the company.