I had the opportunity to attend Catalent’s Covering Every Base in Clinical Supply summit this week in San Diego. The event included updates on their OneHub platform, a tour of the Miramar campus, and discussions with the teams supporting early-phase clinical programs.
A few observations stood out.
Clinical supply depends on more than manufacturing.
Catalent’s OneHub portal is much more than an inventory tracker. It integrates inventory visibility, lot expiration monitoring, distribution scheduling, and document management into a single platform. As clinical programs become increasingly distributed and global, bringing this information together in one place can significantly reduce operational friction.
The San Diego site continues to expand its capabilities.
Since my last visit, the campus has grown to three buildings and expanded its capabilities to including light-sensitive manufacturing and packaging. The facility now supports tablets, capsules, blister packaging, injectables, and specialized handling for high-potency compounds.
Early development remains a critical inflection point.
The Early Phase Development Center combines formulation development, analytical development, spray drying, tablet coating, and other services that help companies move efficiently from development into clinical manufacturing. Seeing these capabilities together reinforces how much successful clinical execution depends on planning well before manufacturing begins.
One takeaway from the day was that clinical supply has become as much an information management challenge as a manufacturing challenge. Coordinating inventory, documentation, packaging, distribution, and regulatory requirements across multiple stakeholders requires systems that are just as robust as the manufacturing processes themselves.
And yes – the day ended with a Padres win from a suite behind home plate. It’s hard to complain about that.
I’m looking forward to returning for Catalent’s Bluesfest in September.