After holding leadership positions at contract manufacturers Patheon and Thermo Fisher Scientific, working in the food and beverage industry was an unusual departure for Nick Buschur.
But it didn’t last long. When he was presented with an opportunity to become CEO at Woodstock Sterile Solutions—a single-site blow-fill-seal manufacturer in Illinois—he jumped at it.
“I really wanted to get back in the CDMO space. I really wanted to get back into sterile solutions,” Buschur said in a recent interview. “This is really a space that’s growing like crazy.”
The job now for Buschur is to help Woodstock ride that wave and grow accordingly. While at Patheon from 2009 to 2017, he got firsthand evidence of the industry’s surge, with the North Carolina-based company taking full advantage.
Under the guidance of former Biogen CEO Jim Mullen, Patheon went from being a small contract operator to a top-tier manufacturer. Bolstered by several acquisitions, Patheon’s revenue grew from $655 million in 2009 to $1.9 billion in 2016. The following year, Thermo Fisher spent $7.2 billion to acquire Patheon.
For Buschur, running single-site Woodstock is similar to his position at Patheon when he was executive director and general manager of its Cincinnati oral solid dosage facility. After the Thermo Fisher takeover, Buschur took on a similar role at Patheon’s site in Greenville, North Carolina, which handles solid-dose and sterile-dose manufacturing.
Woodstock became a standalone facility in 2021 when it was acquired from Catalent by private investment firm SK Capital. Catalent made the move as part of its push to focus on cell and gene therapy manufacturing. Paul Josephs served as Woodstock’s first CEO until his departure in April of last year.
Woodstock employs nearly 400 and operates 24 hours, seven days a week. It manufactures 45 products, delivering them to more than 60 countries, and has 25 projects in development. Since it went solo, however, the company’s commercial base has shrunk from roughly 30 to 20 customers. Buschur’s charge is to attract more business.
“We’re a pure CDMO," the CEO explained. "I think that’s an extremely important piece. If you look at our competitors in the United States, they’re not pure CDMO. They have CDMO activity but they also have internal ownership of products as well. That can come across as a negative for customers,”
Buschur said he also will count on lessons learned from his experience at Patheon.
“When I think about transformational change and what’s gonna take us to the next level, I think about building that culture of operational excellence,” Buschur said. “That’s really the fun part: What is the strategy of doing something bigger and new? That made (Patheon) attractive for Thermo Fisher as we had a culture of continuous improvement. That was built into everything that we did.”
Located 50 miles to the northwest of Chicago, the Woodstock facility opened in 1982 as part of Automatic Liquid Packaging. In 1999, Cardinal Health bought ALP for $390 million. Eight years later, Cardinal sold its CDMO unit to investment firm Blackstone Group for $3.3 billion, which then branded it as Catalent Pharma Solutions.
Last month, Novo Nordisk closed its $16.5 billion buyout of Catalent in the largest M&A deal in the biopharma industry in 2024.