Closer relationships with clinical trial partners are key to ensuring long-term trial success with German pharma giant Bayer, says the company’s Latin America external manufacturing head, Luiz Barberini.
Suppliers “are part of our business”, said Barberini, expressing the close ties Bayer maintains with its partners to attendees at the 2025 Clinical Trial Supply West Coast conference on 10 September in Burlingame, California. Barberini argued that the company’s “trustful relationship model” was key to long-term trial success and implored others to involve partners more closely in their day-to-day operations.
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“Transparency, honesty, and sincere collaboration” with supplier partners is fundamental to safeguarding trial success in the face of these challenges, stated Barberini. To maintain an estimated 1.6 billion patients using Bayer products on a daily basis, he said the company had decided to outsource research and development (R&D) activity in 2018.
But Barberini cautioned that simply outsourcing is not enough to ensure partners’ priorities are aligned with those of the company. Instead, he advocated for involving partnered suppliers in early discussions and sharing internal insights.
Barberini cited personal experience in meeting resistance when seeking to include partners in internal planning meetings. “Once I invited one of our 3PLs (third-party logistics partners) to our S&OP meeting (sales and operations planning), and people called me crazy,” he said. Colleagues were concerned that trade secrets around product costs and customer information could be released when Barberini pointed out the partner already held this information.
Barberini likened this relationship with partners as a game of “paddleball”. “My objective is to give a good ball so he can give me a good ball back,” he said, meaning development and licensing partners must be given close, cooperative support to ensure companies receive constructive support in return.
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By GlobalDataBarberini drew on his experience with managing clinical logistics in Brazil, where he said the industry and wider economy have faced huge roadblocks in recent years from political turmoil and challenging transport over unreliable roads with an often hostile climate, he said. Global infrastructure has faced comparable issues in recent years, he added, noting the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal obstruction in 2021 on international supply chains.
Barberini’s comments reflect discussions at last year’s Clinical Trials in Oncology East Coast conference, held 9–10 July 2024 in Burlington, Massachusetts. There, vendors and partners were described as the backbone of clinical trials by Kevin Stephenson, executive director of data management at Karyopharm Therapeutics.
