At your ‘service’

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed a little change on our cover: a new entry for something called “Contract Services.” I’m sure none of you have any idea what that covers (he said in a highly over-exaggerated manner while rolling his eyes).

Of course you know what those are. But, for the benefit of casual visitors who might be leafing through this issue in your reception area or in your office while waiting for you to get off a call, we’ll mostly be talking in that section about news of contract research organizations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs—or sometimes CDMO for contract development and manufacturing organization)—basically, the firms to whom pharma and biotech companies outsource work that is too complex, burdensome, costly or time-consuming for them to handle themselves.

We did have an Outsourcing department at one time and then dropped it, but now the market for CRO/CMO work has changed.

CROs and CMOs are a pretty critical part of the discovery and development of therapeutics and diagnostics. They often have the specialized systems, connections, scale, etc. to do efficiently what pharmas and biotechs often cannot—or in some cases, the ability to synergistically boost what those companies are already doing to make their work even more efficient and effective.

So, we felt it was high time to give them their own space in the magazine.

This does mean some changes going forward. We haven’t eliminated any existing news sections and have no plans to, so there might be a couple fewer news stories on other topic areas each issue. But, overall, we will tend to have slightly more news stories than we did before.

There is another small change taking place as well. If your eagle eyes were really sharp, you might have also noticed the lack of an entry on the cover’s table of contents for the monthly Q&As that we started running around the time I took the DDNews helm in January 2014. There is indeed a Q&A in this issue, but going forward, it won’t be a regular feature of the physical magazine. However, for the foreseeable future, we expect to include them as a special “online only” feature of each issue. Don’t worry; we’ll tell you in each physical issue where to find it and what company/topic it will address.