Peter High
11-12-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
Catalent Pharma Solutions is a global provider of advanced delivery technologies and development solutions for drugs, biologics and consumer health products. With more than 80 years of experience, Catalent has proven expertise in bringing more customer products to market faster, enhancing product performance and ensuring reliable clinical and commercial product supply.
Catalent employs approximately 8,700 people, including more than 1,000 scientists, at 31 facilities across five continents, and in 2015 generated more than $1.8 billion in revenue. The company’s brand promise is “More products. Better treatments. Reliably supplied.” In partnership with the company’s customers, including companies of all sizes, Catalent develops, formulates and supplies many life-saving therapies. Catalent’s CIO, Michael Del Priore, shares with CIO Insight how IT plays a role in mergers and acquisitions, the benefits of engaging key strategic vendors and some exciting trends in the pharma industry.
CIO Insight: This is not your first stint as an IT executive at a pharmaceutical company, as you were once the vice president and global head of Commercial Operations IT at Roche. You spent more than three years as CIO of consumer packaged goods company Church & Dwight in between, however. When you returned to the industry, what struck you as having changed during that period from an IT perspective?
Del Priore: Personalized medicine, an emerging practice of medicine that uses an individual’s genetic profile to guide decisions made in regard to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, was in its early stages when I was at Roche and has progressed significantly since. This requires new ways of analyzing data to develop and deliver better medicines to patients in a more targeted way. Also, the implementation of product serialization, the means by which drugs can be tracked throughout the supply chain to counter threats such as counterfeiting, adulteration and diversion has progressed. The regulatory frameworks were just being developed when I was at Roche and now they are in effect in certain countries. Therefore, we have invested at Catalent to be in position to service customers who have serialization requirements.
CIO Insight: You have been a member of the mergers & acquisitions team at Catalent. What role do you play as IT leader relative to M&A?
Del Priore: I am part of the team that evaluates potential acquisition targets during the due diligence process to determine whether the target company fits with our strategy, assess how it is run and what it would take to integrate it into Catalent. From an IT perspective, we evaluate their current IT landscape and identify integration costs as well as potential synergies. Of course, if we should acquire a company, we execute the integration using our M&A playbook.
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