CDMO Lonza is strengthening its market leadership with a newly created role that puts seasoned exec Samanta Cimitan, Ph.D., at the helm of the Swiss manufacturer's commercial operations.
After a few years away, Cimitan is rejoining Lonza to serve this time as its chief commercial officer, SVP and member of the company’s extended executive committee, effective Jan. 1, 2027. In the new role, she will head up Lonza’s strategic enterprise account management, global marketing and commercial excellence, the CDMO announced in an Aug. 26 press release.
Through these responsibilities, Lonza looks to better facilitate customer engagement and create a “unified go-to-market approach” across its One Lonza strategy, it said.
“Samanta’s appointment to the new role of Chief Commercial Officer is another important step in building One Lonza and making the full power of the Lonza Engine work for our partners in the pharmaceutical industry,” Lonza’s CEO, Wolfgang Wienand, explained in the release. “Our ambition is clear: Every customer should benefit from the unique breadth of our science, technology and manufacturing capabilities, helping them translate their breakthrough innovations into viable therapies for patients worldwide.”
Wienand attributed the appointment in part to Cimitan’s “CDMO expertise, commercial leadership experience and first-hand knowledge of Lonza,” giving her the chops to foster value “across the full development and manufacturing journey.”
Cimitan comes back to the Lonza ship after a four-year stint at Celonic Group, a pure-play Swiss biologics CDMO. After initially joining as chief business officer, the exec has served as Celonic’s CEO since 2023 and will step down toward the end of this year. She leaves the company having built out a “strong platform for sustainable growth,” Celonic said in a recent release.
Before transitioning to Celonic, Cimitan spent nearly 13 years in leadership positions at Lonza, starting off in the commercial sector in 2009 and ending as VP of group operations in strategic programs and transformation. Her return comes as Lonza continues to build on its One Lonza strategy, focusing on uniting its core competencies to generate long-term value.
Earlier this summer, the growing CDMO strengthened its foothold in the lucrative antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) market with a manufacturing expansion that adds new capacity to an existing plant to bring in additional payload-linker production. Over the first half of 2026, Lonza pulled down sales of 3.4 billion Swiss francs ($4.2 billion), marking 16% growth that reflected “continued robust demand” across technologies and “resilience against a backdrop of evolving macroeconomic dynamics,” it said.