CDMO is the abbreviation for Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization, also known as Pharmaceutical Contract Customization R&D and Production Enterprise in Chinese. Its positioning is to provide customized R&D and production services for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, especially for the process research and preparation, process optimization, scale-up production, registration and validation batch production, and commercial production of innovative drugs. CMO is a customized manufacturing enterprise for pharmaceutical contracts. Compared to CDMO, there is a lack of development, which means there is a lack of improvement in research and development. In other words, CMO enterprises generally do not involve their own technological innovation, relying solely on the production processes and technical support developed by pharmaceutical companies, utilizing their own production facilities for process implementation, and providing customers with scaled up production services. Meanwhile, CDMO can provide customized production services ranging from kilogram to ton level, while confirming chemical structure or component experiments, quality research, process research and optimization. It provides innovative process research and large-scale production services for pharmaceutical enterprises, replacing pure production capacity output with high value-added technology output, and promoting the upgrading of the pharmaceutical CMO industry from capital intensive to technology and capital compound intensive. At present, CDMO enterprises are accelerating the replacement of traditional CMO enterprises.

For most pharmaceutical companies, partially or entirely entrusting CRO companies is an inevitable choice for modern professional division of labor, which is more professional, effective, easier to obtain results, easier to succeed, and reduces costs.

Contract Manufacturing Organization (CMO) is mainly commissioned by pharmaceutical companies to provide services such as process development, formula development, clinical trial drug use, chemical or biosynthetic raw material production, intermediate manufacturing, formulation production (such as powders and injections), and packaging required for product production.