2025 trends report
Spotlight on Pharma
Welcome to Catalant’s Trends Report, a look into top-of-mind priorities, project trends, and insights from leading Catalant Experts, all of which tell a story of the strategic priorities of top industry leaders. In this issue, our Healthcare Practice is in the spotlight as we dive into the life sciences industry.
introduction
Trends to Explore
Welcome to Catalant’s Trends Report, a look into top-of-mind priorities, project trends, and insights from leading Catalant Experts, all of which tell a story of the strategic priorities of top industry leaders. In this issue, our Healthcare Practice is in the spotlight as we dive into the life sciences industry.
Today, even the most innovative life sciences teams are struggling to balance speed of execution with the necessity of derisking in this volatile environment. Unprecedented uncertainties in the global economy and the regulatory landscape have only heightened the challenge, leaving pharma leaders perplexed about how to calculate risk and accelerate in the right direction.
Through industry interviews and trends from recent project data, we see three major themes that executives must pay attention to in 2025:
Strategic Focus & Risk Management
Operational Agility & Supply Chain Digitization
Digital Transformation & Data Analytics
The next wave of competitive advantage in healthcare will belong to organizations that combine strategic foresight, operational resilience, and digital innovation—not in isolation, but in lockstep. Engaging experts with cross-functional capacity and deep industry knowledge to lead these efforts can drive cost reduction and protect revenue, which are essential priorities given the possibility of an economic downturn in the coming months.
Meet the Experts
Jeremy Cohen | View Profile
With nearly two decades of experience in advisory and operational roles across the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, Jeremy specializes in supporting clients through every stage of the commercial lifecycle from early-stage opportunity assessment through product launch and lifecycle management. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and both an MS (Columbia University) and a BS (Tulane University) in biomedical engineering.
Terry Young | View Profile
With more than two decades of leadership experience at global biopharma companies—including Bristol Myers Squibb, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson—Terry has orchestrated transformative supply chain initiatives spanning 40+ global markets. His work has delivered more than one hundred million dollars in enterprise value through operational streamlining, technology adoption, workforce optimization, and outsourcing strategies.
Nirav Shah | View Profile
Nirav brings a combination of business acumen and technical expertise to complex data science and analytics projects at every stage of the therapeutic life cycle. He is also an adjunct professor at Tufts University, teaching graduate-level courses such as Machine Learning and Data Visualization with Tableau and PBI.
theme 1
Strategic Focus & Risk Management
Only a few months into the year, the unpredictable environment of 2025 emphasizes the need for a resilient and adaptable operating framework. A strong strategic focus is required to drive organizational change, business transformation, and potential new operating models.
This is especially true when facing a potential recession. Coupled with the pace of innovation plus changes to the competitive landscape, this translates to a rising need for more flexible and agile strategic planning frameworks.
As Catalant Expert Jeremy Cohen of Spinnaker Life Sciences Strategy Consulting emphasized, companies must consider risk within the context of scenario-based strategic planning. Navigating the unknown requires a deep understanding of potential challenges, especially when they’re irregularities. In uncertain environments, the likelihood of outlier scenarios increases, requiring that leaders consider all possibilities, even once unlikely outcomes.
Even amid unprecedented unpredictability, it’s still possible to forge a viable path, especially for organizations that operate within an adaptable framework. Catalant gives organizations the flexibility to get high-value insights from experts adept at managing rapid-fire changes to protect innovation at scale, derisking investments every step of the way.
platform trends
Catalant platform data reveals our pharma clients continue to concentrate on strategic focus and risk management as a core priority in 2025. In 2024, 41.0% of healthcare projects emphasized strategic initiatives like brand positioning, regulatory navigation, and risk management. In early 2025, that focus remains strong, with 38.7% of projects continuing to prioritize these themes.
38.7% of projects emphasize brand positioning, regulatory navigation, and risk management.
case study
Uncovering The Market For A New Drug Entering A Crowded, Mature Therapeutic Category
Jeremy Cohen and his team take on complex projects where they offer comprehensive guidance in high-risk, high-reward scenarios. In one engagement, a large pharmaceutical company needed help evaluating the market for a new drug within a crowded and mature therapeutic category.
The drug was in Phase 2, and the company needed to decide whether to continue development after having already invested in both the product and the process. Jeremy’s team empowered leaders to understand the market dynamics influencing a launch trajectory, and they created a detailed assessment of a potential product differentiation in the market.
After co-facilitating an advisory board that identified unmet needs and potential drivers of demand post-launch, the team developed revenue forecasts for the US and EU5 countries. With these insights, the company continued with clinical development, launched its new product, and positioned it as a market leader, reaching “blockbuster” status.
theme 2
Supply Chain Agility & Digitization
Today, operational agility and supply chain digitization are no longer competitive advantages. They are fundamental requirements. Pharmaceutical companies must revise the traditional supply chain playbook—built for predictability—to favor digital-first strategies that enable real-time tracking, predictive analytics, and cross-functional integration.
The challenges are compounding. Reexamining and reinvesting in global supply chain capabilities is no longer optional—it’s a matter of corporate survival. As inflationary pressures, geopolitical shifts, and regulatory changes converge, supply chains have become the frontline for maintaining product availability, safeguarding margins, and preserving market access. As Catalant Expert Terry Young of Kryus Ventures notes, for pharmaceutical companies, every organizational challenge—from compliance risk to cash flow constraints—ultimately cascades into the supply chain. Visibility into your network and partner operations isn’t just operational intelligence; it’s a strategic lever for solving enterprise-wide issues creatively and proactively.
Take the U.S. Department of Commerce’s recent initiation of a Section 232 investigation into pharmaceutical imports. This probe, aimed at assessing the national security implications of reliance on foreign pharmaceuticals and their components, could lead to the imposition of tariffs on a wide range of products, including finished drugs, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and key starting materials—potentially disrupting established supply chains and introducing sudden cost increases.
Companies that leverage real-time visibility, intelligent automation, and scenario planning tools are better equipped to navigate these unprecedented unknowns, accelerate innovation, and deliver critical therapies without disruption.
platform trends
Operational agility and supply chain optimization have remained critical priorities: 56.6% of healthcare projects in 2024 and 45.2% of early 2025 projects explicitly focus on streamlining processes, digitizing workflows, and enhancing supply chain resilience. The slight decline from 2024 to 2025 suggests that agility initiatives are increasingly embedded into baseline operations rather than standing as separate transformation projects.
45.2% of projects explicitly focus on streamlining processes, digitizing workflows, and enhancing supply chain resilience.
case study
Biopharmaceutical Company Navigating Global Supply Chain Disruptions
In the wake of global supply chain disruptions in 2024, a $2.3 billion specialty biopharma company struggled to manage strained operations. Reliant on single-source API suppliers in Southeast Asia and grappling with siloed internal systems, the company faced mounting production delays, inventory shortages, and increasing regulatory risk. The company engaged Terry Young’s team to lead a strategic overhaul of its global supply chain operations.
The team conducted a rapid diagnostic to identify key vulnerabilities and design a digital-first transformation roadmap, including the implementation of real-time visibility platforms, supplier diversification strategies, and risk-based governance models. Through advanced analytics and scenario planning, the team improved responsiveness and reduced operational blind spots. Terry also coached leadership on embedding agility into planning processes and established new standards for supplier performance, audit readiness, and compliance tracking.
As a result, the company restored 95% on-time delivery, reduced supplier dependency by 40%, and achieved $14.2 million in cost savings across sourcing, freight, and inventory management. The company achieved audit readiness across six major CMO sites, and a digital twin model enabled real-time scenario modeling for supply chain disruptions.
theme 3
Digital Transformation & Data Analytics
In 2025, executives are increasingly focused on digital advancements, including cloud computing and generative AI, to enhance products and services. New technologies are an essential part of tackling new challenges; we need to leverage one to move through the other. This is particularly true of AI and machine learning.
The adoption of AI capabilities is still relatively nascent in the pharmaceutical industry. At the enterprise level, organizations must evaluate AI hype vs. reality, assess addressable use cases, and consider how to deploy solutions in a scalable, efficient manner.
The challenge for life sciences organizations isn’t the technology; it’s the transformation. Technology, like AI, is a valuable tool, one with tremendous potential for impact across the value chain, from commercial operations to clinical development and research and development. However, this tool requires strategy, adoption, and change management for successful transformation.
One success story Nirav Shah of OnPoint Insights shared points to a digital advancement many organizations can benefit from. In the case of internal data, leaders would do well to leverage large language models. With the right insights, teams can reimagine decision-making in every stage of a therapy—throughout the life cycle of a new drug through go-to-market strategy.
platform trends
Catalant platform trends reveal projects emphasizing technology implementation, CRM/ERP integrations, and digital strategy, clear signals that leveraging data-driven insights will be critical for competitive advantage. We see a small dip in the share of 2025 projects focused on digital transformation and data analytics—38.1% in 2024 vs. 29.0% so far in 2025. Digital projects are still very much active, just not scaling explosively yet.
29% of projects explicitly focus on digitizing internal processes, building strong analytics backbones across functions, and data modernization.
case study
Marketing Data Analytics
A large pharmaceutical company’s marketing team was challenged by a dispersed marketing and data infrastructure that was inaccessible and unmanageable. Each data source had its own API, schema, and authentication mechanism, which made it impossible to benefit from a clear view into global marketing performance. In a normal economy, this kind of view is indispensable; amid the current unknowns, it’s even more integral to a resilient strategy.
Nirav Shah led a team that managed a complex process that automated the end-to-end data ingestion and transformation pipeline across all platforms. Now, leaders benefit from near-real-time, dynamic Tableau dashboards with interactive features that switch between different views. The client’s team can now analyze marketing performance at both a granular level and zoom out to a wider lens, empowering them to stay confident.
conclusion
Conclusion
As the economic outlook of the pharmaceutical industry continues to evolve, it’s clear that pharmaceutical executives in 2025 must balance operational excellence and strategic clarity while seizing the still-early advantages in digital transformation to outpace competitors. This year’s leaders won’t just be the ones who excel at one dimension—they will be those who strategically integrate operational agility, digital capabilities, and brand resilience into every layer of the organization.
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