Across our four divisions (Biologics, Small Molecules, Cell & Gene and Capsules & Heath Ingredients), we offer a wide breadth of services and products that deliver on our Group vision to bring any therapy to life.
Today, the biopharmaceutical industry is able to treat many of the world’s most serious illnesses. The great challenge of modern medicine does not only lie in the discovery of new treatments. We must also find ways to manufacture and commercialize these treatments at speed while maintaining safety, quality and value. At the same time, we see that treatments and modalities are becoming increasingly complex and the path to commercialization is becoming more challenging to navigate. In this uncertain and changing environment, Lonza’s ability to support customers across the entire product lifecycle has never been more important.
Our unique capability to meet customers’ complex needs is underpinned by five strategic priorities which sit at the heart of our business strategy. While maintaining a focus on these priorities, we also remained responsive to changes in the external environment in 2022 – from macroeconomic trends to the evolving competitive landscape. By delivering on our strategic priorities while remaining agile to change, we will continue to drive long-term value and success.
This section highlights our five strategic priorities, and demonstrates the progress made in each key area during 2022.
Delivering exceptional customer service, built upon mutual trust and respect, is a priority for our business. We work alongside our customers to address their most pressing needs. This approach is supported by close collaboration and an integrated, end-to-end service offering.
Across the business, we continued to maintain our focus on Lean operating principles with the rollout of our Lean training program in 2022. By actively identifying opportunities for improvement in day to day performance, this approach drives operational excellence internally while delivering improved levels of speed, value and quality for our customers.
In 2022, we ran our Lonza Promoter Score (LPS) survey for the third consecutive year. This provided valuable insights into our customers’ satisfaction with our services and products, and enabled us to measure our impact. The feedback consistently demonstrated the value that our customers place on the specialist knowledge of our people. From large pharma and nutraceuticals to small biotech, our customers actively seek the expertise of our colleague community to bring their treatments to market. We have seen increased satisfaction scores across the business in 2022 compared with the first LPS survey in 2020. This reflects our ongoing efforts to drive continuous improvement.
In Capsules & Health Ingredients, we launched a new service package to further enhance collaboration with our customers. Through Launch with Lonza™, we now partner with customers to help solve their unique dosage delivery challenges. This collaborative approach positions Lonza as an industry leading partner with the capabilities and expertise to guide customers through the entire product cycle.
To support our vision to bring any therapy to life, we continued to expand our breadth of offerings. Over the course of the year, we continued to build both capacity and capability in our Small Molecules division. In March 2022, we completed an expansion to our laboratories in Nansha (CN) for the clinical supply of highly-potent APIs (HPAPIs). HPAPIs form a large part our development pipeline, and the expansion enables us to meet growing global demand for HPAPI manufacturing - especially in oncology clinical trials.
In response to strong demand from customers for agile, phase-appropriate manufacturing services for early-phase clinical trials, we added a dedicated Early Phase Clinical Manufacturing facility at our Small Molecules site in Bend (US). This new facility provides additional capacity for solutions to complex bioavailability challenges in clinical projects.
In Biologics, there was a major development in July 2022, when we announced a ~CHF 500 million investment to build a new commercial Drug Product facility in Stein (CH). This new facility strengthens our ability to support customers throughout the drug development journey from early development to clinical and commercial supply.
Finally, in Capsules & Health Ingredients, we expanded the breath of our offerings in 2022 to satisfy growing pharmaceutical and nutraceutical customer demand for high-value capsules with novel functionalities. From specialized delivery solutions to “free-from” products, our differentiated and broad portfolio ensures that we can meet customer needs.
At Lonza, sustainability is about delivering long-term value environmentally, economically and socially. To support our work in this important area, we have selected the seven UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are most relevant to our business. These range from climate and water action to people development and gender equality. As of 2022, we reflected this ESG focus in our global remuneration policies across every level of the organization. This was designed to drive engagement and ensure that sustainability achievements are recognized as a core metric in our long term success.
Significant gains have been made at a site level across the global network. In Visp (CH), we completed an investment to achieve a 20% annual reduction in water usage by using recycled water for steam production. In Nansha (CN), we have achieved an annual saving of 90 MWh with a simple upgrade to automate our air conditioning systems. Finally, our site in Puebla (MX) is now using 100% renewable electricity from wind and solar to power its operations.
At a global level, we sourced 25% of our purchased electricity from renewable sources in 2022, as part of a program to replace our traditional power mix with green electricity by 2025, where possible. While our business grew substantially during the last year, this was achieved alongside efficiency gains and without significant footprint growth. As a result, we met all of our global sustainability intensity goals in 2022, and have already reached our 2030 targets on waste and CO₂ emissions. We have since amended our 2030 goals to target a more ambitious 50% reduction in intensity.
We support our customers with a combination of scientific, regulatory and manufacturing expertise. In 2022, we responded at speed to changing regulatory requirements and supported customers through stringent commercial approvals. This was accompanied by the launch of several new solutions backed by our scientific and manufacturing capabilities.
Capsules & Health Ingredients launched two innovative capsule solutions in 2022. Capsugel® Enprotect™ is designed for intestinal drug delivery and does not disintegrate during stomach transit. This provides a viable oral solution to deliver novel therapies to the small intestine. We also launched our proprietary titanium dioxide (TiO2)-free white hard gelatin capsule in response to the European Union Commission’s decision to ban TiO2 from food colorants. The TiO2 free capsule was recognized with a Regulatory and Compliance Award at the CPhI Pharma Awards in Q4.
The regulatory expertise of our Cell & Gene division was highlighted in October 2022 when we announced that two cell and gene therapies manufactured at our Houston (US) site received FDA approval. These approvals represent the second and third cell and gene therapy (CGT) commercial approvals supported by the facility, and reflect our colleagues’ commitment to partnering with our customers on the path to commercialization. We are committed to collaborating with regulatory authorities and playing an active role in establishing commercial manufacturing quality standards as the CGT field continues to evolve.
Our approach to innovation provides a critical point of differentiation for our business and delivers advantages for our customers. In the last year, Cell & Gene focused on further enhancing the performance and functionality of our innovative Cocoon® Platform for automated cell therapy manufacturing by introducing a magnetic selection capability, which is designed to address challenges in the manufacturing process. The magnetic selection capability, which we announced in April 2022, can be utilized at any point in the manufacturing process to provide a high level of customization and consistency. It expands our end-to-end solution for cell therapy manufacturing and demonstrates our commitment to sustained investment in next-generation technologies.
We continue to innovate our offering in line with evolving customer needs. In recent years, the biologics pipeline has continued to evolve towards more complex protein formats. Responding to this industry development, in January 2022 we launched our new bYlok® technology platform for the discovery and design of complex proteins. The solution was recognized by The Medicine Maker amongst the top innovations of 2022.
The path to commercialization continues to accelerate across the healthcare industry, and we understand that speed remains a critical contributor to competitive advantage. Across the business, we continue to find new ways to ramp up speed to market for customers of all sizes. In particular, smaller companies without in-house development and manufacturing capacity can significantly benefit from collaborating with a single CDMO throughout their development and manufacturing journey.
We understand that biopharmaceutical companies face increasing pressure to advance molecules to first-in-human trials faster than ever before. Our early development services in Slough and Cambridge (UK) are helping Biologics customers to de-risk this process with efficiency gains, which offer huge potential to accelerate timelines. We combine human expertise with artificial intelligence (AI) to resolve potential issues and stabilize molecules prior to clinical trial. This offering is helping customers to reduce failure risks in early development, reduce failure risks and accelerate speed to market.
We also launched two new offerings in Biologics targeting standard and more complex proteins to support timelines to clinic. We can now support our customers in moving from gene to Investigational New Drug designation (IND) filing in 11 months for standard monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and from gene to IND in 13 months for more complex proteins.
We continue to advance our bioconjugates offering to support speed to patient. We now offer the Lonza Bioconjugation Toolbox, which provides customers access to tools and scalable technology to support discovery, development and manufacture.
