How Peptide Development Complexity Is Reshaping CDMO Partnerships: Part Two

As peptide therapeutics become larger, more complex, and increasingly purity-sensitive, manufacturers are confronting a new layer of execution challenges. Long-chain peptides introduce compounding scale-up inefficiencies, increasingly fragile purification requirements, and impurity profiles that become more difficult to characterize and control at commercial scale. At the same time, growing dependence on specialized amino acids, tightly specified reagents, and globally distributed supply chains are forcing developers and CDMOs to think more strategically about how process design decisions made early in development can ultimately determine long-term manufacturability and program risk. In this episode of Off Script, we continued our conversation with Dr. Sharadsrikar Venkatesan Kotturi, chief scientific officer at Neuland Laboratories, about the operational and technical realities shaping modern peptide manufacturing. The discussion explores why long-chain and high-purity peptides become increasingly difficult to scale reproducibly, how aggregation, impurity control, and analytical sensitivity compound across larger sequences, and why process robustness ultimately determines whether peptide programs can succeed commercially. We also examine the growing intersection between process design and supply chain resilience, including how early route selection decisions can amplify sourcing risk for protected amino acids and specialized reagents.