Forging a company’s soul: Alessandro Maselli
At Catalent, success is measured a little differently. The scale of its impact is difficult to overstate. More than 1,000 active development programs, over 7,000 products supported and more than 60 billion doses produced annually across a global network spanning nearly 40 sites.
Half of all United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved products over the past decade touched Catalent at some point in their journey. Yet for President and CEO Alessandro Maselli, even those figures don’t fully capture what the company represents.
The numbers only tell part of the story. The real impact, he says, is often much closer to home.
"The mission of the company – helping people live better and healthier lives – is not a tagline, it’s what we do every day," he tells The CEO Magazine.
"It’s very likely that you’re going to know somebody either in your family or in your friend group that is taking a medication that has either been developed or is currently produced by Catalent."
The mission behind the molecules
This sense of purpose has shaped Maselli’s leadership throughout his almost 16 years with the organization. It’s also helped steer Catalent through an extraordinary period of transformation and growth as the contract development and manufacturing organization industry has changed.
The company’s roots stretch back to 1933, when RP Scherer pioneered the softgel capsule – a drug delivery breakthrough that would reshape pharmaceutical manufacturing. Decades of growth and evolution followed, culminating in 2007 when the business was spun off from Cardinal Health and established as an independent company under the Catalent name.
Since then, an ambitious program of acquisitions and investment has built what is today an end-to-end ecosystem spanning oral technologies, biologics and advanced modalities, including cell and gene therapy.
"Catalent today is the result of bringing together almost 40 different companies and integrating them into a unified operating platform," he explains, adding that the evolution has demanded agility and constant adaptation.
In collaboration with
VWR
Maselli joined Catalent in Italy as a director before relocating to the United Kingdom and eventually progressing through increasingly senior operational leadership roles before becoming COO and eventually CEO.
"Getting where we are today is owed to the ability of having clarity of thought around what was required at the time," he says. "We’ve been able to build a team that has been essential to that objective."
Playing the long game
Patience has also been key to the business model. Catalent often partners with customers years before a therapy ever reaches patients, helping guide molecules from preclinical development through commercialization and beyond.
"The future is written in the stars and the stars are our molecules," Maselli says. "The mantra of the company has always been to follow the molecule.
"We try to engage with a molecule very early and then we follow it through the life cycle."
The approach requires an uncanny ability to think ahead. Decisions around capital investment are often made years before facilities or capabilities are fully needed.
"We need to look far into the future and anticipate trends so we can prepare for them," he points out.
A new era of therapies
Much of the future is being driven by rapidly evolving science. Maselli talks of protein therapies, gene therapies, RNA-based medicines and increasingly targeted oncology treatments, which are completely reshaping the biopharmaceutical landscape.
"The pharma industry today has a higher number of potential successful modalities than ever," he says. "In just the oncology space, there are antibody drug conjugates, proteins, protein degraders, immunotherapies, monoclonal antibodies and oncolytic viruses."
To the untrained ear, this sounds like alphabet soup. So Maselli breaks it down more simply.
"Essentially, the number of ways the industry is going about fighting cancer has never been this big," he explains, lighting up at the promise.
At the same time, Maselli acknowledges that challenges still exist. Smaller biotech companies are now responsible for the vast majority of pharmaceutical innovation, yet many lack the infrastructure required to manufacture and scale therapies on their own.
"The majority of innovation in our industry is coming from small biotech organizations. They are the innovation engine," he says.
"But they don’t have the infrastructure to do some of the clinical and production work that is required. So they really need a lot of services from the outside, and that’s where Catalent comes in."
Enabling the innovators
This is especially true given the nature of more targeted treatments, according to Maselli.
"New medicines are more precise," he says. "They are tailored for very small patient populations, which means the volume of each drug is going to be smaller."
This shift has a knock-on effect, changing the economics of manufacturing as well. Smaller populations often mean lower production volumes, making it difficult for individual companies to justify building large-scale infrastructure.
"Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for a variety of contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) services is far greater than before," he adds.
Advertisement
The trend plays directly to the company’s strengths as one of the few global CDMOs operating at significant scale with end-to-end capabilities.
"Catalent is one of the only two or three companies in the world that has this breadth of capability," he points out.
The human side of scale
For many pharmaceutical companies, Maselli says they’d be lucky to get five drugs approved within the span of a typical career. For Catalent, thanks to its approach, the number of FDA approvals the company supports is far greater.
"In the Catalent ecosystem, we support the development and manufacture of a number of treatments every year because of the number of different clients that we have," he says.
"So the magical moment when a drug that’s really going to change people’s lives gets over the line – for us, it’s an experience that’s repeated week in, week out."
The feeling that comes with such a feat is hard to put into words. But Maselli reaches for an analogy.
"When you ask a NASA employee what they do, they say, ‘I help to put people on the moon.’ I believe that’s exactly how we feel here," he says.
"We really help people live healthier and better lives and it’s incredibly powerful."
Patient first by design
Inside Catalent, the phrase ‘Patient First’ carries significant operational weight. Maselli says the company began intentionally embedding that culture across the organization more than a decade ago, focusing less on slogans and more on behavior.
"We expect everybody in everything they do every day, first and foremost, to ask themselves the question, ‘What is going to be the impact on the patient of what I’m doing right here right now?’" he explains.
The idea applies across the entire business from manufacturing floors to executive decision-making.
"It’s not a set of processes. It’s not a set of tools. It’s a cultural mindset that you embed in every employee of the organization," he says.
Naturally, this mindset shapes how Catalent approaches its customer relationships as well. Maselli describes the ambition internally as delivering the equivalent of a ‘Four Seasons experience’ – a level that goes beyond meeting expectations to exceeding them.
"It’s that customer obsession, that passion to go above and beyond our customers’ needs," he says. "It’s even going beyond to deliver services and experiences that the customer didn’t even know they needed."
Keeping this culture alive requires leadership support. In fact, Maselli spends more than half his time traveling between sites across the company’s global footprint.
"I need to be the ambassador of that culture," he says. "I need to be the first one showing up at the site, living and embodying our culture."
The effort appears to be paying off. Catalent’s customer satisfaction and net promoter scores have steadily improved over the years, Maselli confirms. And he believes these strong roots will help the company grow above market rates.
"There is a possibility for us to gain share from our competition because of our premium customer experience and because of our ‘championing the missions that matter’ philosophy," he points out.
Accelerating innovation with AI
Maselli believes innovation will be key to Catalent’s ongoing success. But importantly, it won’t just be innovation for innovation’s sake.
"First, we need to understand what innovations exist to solve the needs that are currently unmet," he says. "Is it customer convenience? Is it to make the drug more affordable and accessible? Is it to ramp up production levels?"
To help with these questions, Maselli sees AI becoming transformative for the business.
"It’s very important for us to invest in the adoption of AI and really leverage it to improve outcomes," he explains.
Most recently, Catalent launched Qai™, the company’s first enterprise AI solution, designed to enhance quality management processes. Qai leverages enterprise data to accelerate analysis, identify root causes and improve the development of corrective and preventive actions. Its launch marks a major step in the company’s broader strategy to use advanced technologies to improve consistency, efficiency and Patient First outcomes.
One of the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry’s biggest challenges is achieving what’s known as ‘right the first time’ outcomes.
"For us, it’s about figuring out how we can get the expected outcome right the first time as opposed to through several iterations," he says.
As such, Catalent is now investing heavily in AI tools designed to improve performance and accelerate problem-solving. Its scale gives the company a unique advantage.
"We happen to have one of the biggest databases of pharmaceutical data in the world," Maselli reveals, adding that it’s already helping teams improve operational efficiency.
"We’ve been seeing our speed to resolve unexpected outcomes like deviations improving by 45 percent already. And this is just the beginning. It’s all very exciting."
Building an AI-augmented workforce
Maselli’s AI ambitions don’t stop there.
"Over time, we’re going to see more effective drugs, quicker-to-market drugs and to be honest, more affordable drugs thanks to AI," he predicts.
"Because iterations can cause rejection of materials and rejection of batches, reprocessing, reduced yields, and all of that contributes to an increase in the cost of manufacturing a drug."
Advertisement
He’s equally focused on how AI can improve the working lives of Catalent’s employees.
"I’d like to see an AI-augmented workforce," he says. "I encourage my team to take advantage of AI to get more done quicker and easier.
"AI can help them deliver outstanding results and achieve what is expected of them without the long days. It can help them have a more balanced life, which I’m a big believer in.
"People perform better in the long run when they have balance in their lives."
The power of partnership
Partnerships sit at the heart of the organization’s business model. Without pharmaceutical and biotech companies developing new molecules, there’d be no pipeline. Without suppliers, manufacturing technologies and research collaborators, many therapies would never make it to patients.
"Partnerships are the fabric of Catalent," Maselli says. "They’re something we cannot do without."
The company’s ability to champion the missions that matter is strengthened by partnerships with world-class organizations that share its commitment to service excellence. For example, Avantor provides critical laboratory and production materials across Catalent’s global network. Repligen delivers essential bioprocessing technologies that support biologics manufacturing. Sartorius provides with advanced filtration, cell culture and process analytics solutions.
Together, these partnerships reflect the collaborative ‘patient first’ mindset at the core of Catalent's operating model.
Having spent nearly two decades at Catalent, he has watched many long-term relationships evolve alongside his own career.
"What I’ve found to be the most successful element of partnerships is the trust that’s built over time among leaders in the organizations," he says.
"The moments those relationships are built are during the tough times. Where there is a problem, when there is a big setback, and instead of pointing the finger at each other, you find yourself in the trenches together, shoulder to shoulder, solving it together for the patient, which again, is the beauty of being a patient-first organization.
"Because when it comes to any challenge, our first priority is always about solving the problem for the patient. We’ll deal with the rest. We need to be responsible stewards of the balance sheet, of course, but first and foremost, there is a patient to serve and a problem to solve.
"I believe this behavior helps us create strong, aligned partnerships."
A company with soul
As Maselli looks to the future, he wants Catalent to continue to grow, gain share and strengthen the culture he believes defines the organization. He also hopes to see several major therapies currently in development successfully reach patients in the years ahead.
"We are working on some things now that are going to be incredibly impactful," he reveals. "If they get across the line, it’s going to be a very emotional time for us and the lives they change."
More than anything, though, Maselli wants Catalent to remain a company with staying power – one whose mission endures beyond any single leader or chapter in the company’s history.
"Catalent has been around for more than 70 years and I believe we are going to be around for the next 70-plus years," he says.
"Things come and go, leaders come and go, but Catalent always remains. What’s most important is creating a company that has a soul."