CRO Session: Olon Ricerca Bioscience - interview with Alessandro Agosti, Senior Director of Scientific Operations

Olon Ricerca Bioscience is a US-based Contract Research Organisation (CRO) offering speciality chemical manufacturing capabilities.

We spoke to Alessandro Agosti, Senior Director of Scientific Operations about how they partner with customers, and some of the ways they are unique. 

The CRO was founded 1986, before being acquired by Olon SpA in 2017.   Now part of the wider Olon Group, Alessandro explains that "clients can tap into a 'One stop shop' taking them from early phase work to scaling up into full commercial manufacturing - leveraging Olon's technologies and the centre of excellence."

Speed of development is a top requirement, says Alessandro, providing the example of a recent collaboration with a US-based pharma company to develop an oncology drug. They escalated from a very early phase to full GMP manufacturing within one year.

"It was a quite a big jump in terms of scale. It was made possible because of the continuous interaction between the different teams fine-tuning the process, the analytical work, as well as the process engineering that is inevitably needed when you go from a few 100 grammes to manufacturing batches on on large scale on a chemical on a chemical plant."

"A trend that that we are seeing from many clients is the requirement to move research and manufacturing away from the Far East" says Alessandro.

While acknowledging this comes with a higher price tag, moving research to the United States is "has clear advantages in terms of control and interaction with customers", adding that it's more important than ever "to deliver first time and keep to the timeline in these very challenging times."

"We like to provide clients with a roadmap for their development, partnering from a very eary stage. This includes the way we write the proposal, the way we try to understand the client's most immediate needs. That will drives and impact the way we do the process development."

"We want to think that there might be a much larger scale, scale up required further down the road, and we believe that establishing a partnership and providing a process package rather than selling a product is the key to a successful working relationship."