Charles River Laboratories

Luis Berrade

Through this article, Luis Berrade and Ian Wyllie from Charles River Laboratories discuss the evolution of biopharmaceutical outsourcing and the limitations of traditional models. They introduce RightSource, a comprehensive lab solution brought directly to client sites, offering faster, more cost-effective, and scalable quality control operations through a servicebased model. This innovative approach addresses the critical needs of biopharmaceutical companies in today’s dynamic landscape.

Over the past few years we have seen some significant changes in the Biopharmaceutical industry. There have been major breakthroughs in new modalities that are changing the lives of patients. Companies are also getting creative in the operating models that they are utilizing to bring drugs to the market. Increasingly companies are trying to focus more on their core competencies while partnering with vendors that complement them well.

For many years we saw a push towards insourcing models where a staffing agency would manage some of the staff and areas of operations in a Biopharmaceutical company. This helped companies with some of their cost structure and focus but true partnership was difficult from competing incentives between the two organizations. Many of these contracts were not strategic and came down to how well an organization could recruit and keep talent, while simultaneously keeping the cost of talent down—beyond that there wasn’t much to compete or innovate on.

Unfortunately, this is a result of the structure of these contracts, the vendors would provide basic training and staff but the biopharmaceutical company would have all of their own processes that needed to be followed. This made it very difficult to provide any innovation or build a scalable model.

As a result of this problem, we created a program at Charles River to align incentives and encourage innovation with and for our clients. Our RightSource Platform was made to bring the whole lab to a client site as opposed to just the people—who are still very important. This allowed us to bring in everything from the overarching quality and digital system to individual standard operating procedures (SOP) and test methods.

By bringing in the whole Charles River System we are able to invest heavily in a scalable and highly digitalized program that provides quality control (QC) services to the client. The better we get at this program the more value we can provide to the client and the next client we bring on since it is a scalable model. To align the incentives, we do not charge for the people but rather the services provided as well as penalties on ourselves for the agreed upon metrics. This allows us to hire top talent into our org where they are not the cost we are trying to control. We control cost by providing a scalable and high-value service.

This model has become especially important in recent years where capital is constrained and speed is so critical. Since much of this model is ‘pre-baked’ if a client is building out a new facility, we can setup the QC function in less than half the time and cost since so much of what needs to be established lives in our global system and we are just extending it. There are validation packages that we can just re-execute, SOPs that we can extend and were designed to be extended, etc. As we continue to invest in the model, the benefits will continue to stack on each other.