As precision medicine forces biopharma to rethink how it builds, runs, and scales laboratory and manufacturing infrastructure, the industry's next competitive advantage will be found not in discovery, but in operational execution. Few are better positioned to make that argument than Michael Stubblefield, recently appointed CEO of PerkinElmer, who is transforming the company into an end-to-end life sciences partner spanning discovery, laboratory operations, and manufacturing support. Drawing on more than three decades across specialty materials, life sciences, and technology services, Stubblefield outlines how AI, automation, advanced therapies, and ecosystem collaboration are reshaping biopharma, and explains how PerkinElmer's growth strategy, recent acquisitions, and ambition to return time to scientists are turning that thesis into commercial reality.
You have spent your entire career at the intersection of specialty materials, life sciences, and technology services. Coming from leading Avantor, another life science tool and service provider, what drew you to joining PerkinElmer?
When I look back over what is now more than 30 years, my background is grounded in a technical foundation. I am a chemical engineer by training and have spent my career in and around specialty materials and specialty chemical platforms. When I joined Avantor over a decade ago, I began adding services and equipment instruments into that mix, which gave me a background that encompasses most of what goes into the life sciences ecosystem.
What I love about working in this space is that the mission has real, tangible impact, on people we know, in our own families, sometimes personally. Linking a profound purpose with the opportunity to build businesses around technology and innovation is where I have spent most of my career. I have also had the opportunity to develop a global perspective, having lived and worked in each of the major regions, and surrounded myself with people I have learned a great deal from.
One thing I have found particularly interesting over the course of my career is how companies have moved from standalone entities to much more developed concepts of ecosystems and value chains. Being part of an ecosystem like life sciences has been deeply rewarding.
How did your relationship with New Mountain Capital, under which Avantor and PerkinElmer are both portfolio companies, play a role in this transition?
I have had a longstanding association with New Mountain Capital, going back to when they brought me in to run and build Avantor for them in 2014. We partnered in that venture for nearly 12 years. They have a unique approach to business building that aligns with how I think about building a technology-centric or innovation-driven business: grounded in investments in capability and technology, cultivating research and development pipelines, and bringing all of that into close collaboration with customers. It is a long-term approach, and one that is somewhat unusual for private equity. When they gave me the opportunity to come back and support them in this venture, I did not hesitate.
When I looked under the hood at what PerkinElmer has, I found a long legacy, a nearly hundred-year-old business, that in many ways behaves like a start-up, given its history and the carve-out from Revvity. There has been a great deal of work done over the last few years to execute on that carve-out and put the infrastructure in place, and you can now see the value of the investments made in innovation rooted in some game-changing technologies. There is an extremely loyal customer base. And when I look at the macro conditions in life sciences right now, they are quite conducive to growth, particularly for agile, innovative companies. Put all of that together, and it was a challenge I wanted to take on.
For readers unfamiliar with PerkinElmer post-divestiture of Revvity, how would you describe the company’s position and core offering today?
This is a sophisticated platform, and it is important to recognize its full scope. Many people would know PerkinElmer for its deep roots as a leader in analytical instruments across technology verticals like material characterization, organics, and inorganics, and that remains an important part of what we do. But over the years, the business has been rounded out considerably.
We operate across three connected businesses. In our Analytical and Testing Solutions business we develop and manufacture precision instruments used in everything from pharma, environmental testing and industrial applications to food quality and safety, backed by a global aftermarket services operation that supports customers across the full instrument lifecycle.
Our Pharma Specialty Services business is where we get closest to our customers’ day-to-day operations. Through OneSource, a significant part of our workforce is embedded directly within customers’ laboratories, helping maintain and operate their high-end analytical instruments and keeping their labs and drug development running at peak performance. Through Project Farma, we go further still: partnering with clients on strategic planning and facility design, and providing the project management, commissioning, qualification, and validation services that large pharma and biotech organizations need to plan, build, and operate GMP-compliant manufacturing facilities globally, moving from drug development into clinical or commercial production. And through Covaris, we have added best-in-class sample preparation capabilities for genomics and proteomics.
The result is a platform that spans early-stage discovery all the way through scale-up and manufacturing, and in some cases beyond, including solutions that help bring samples from more remote environments into the laboratory setting, whether to accelerate research or to support patient treatment. The reach of this business is significant.
What is the strategic rationale for PerkinElmer’s move toward an end-to-end service model, and how does it reflect where the biopharma sector is heading?
Nobody has truly established themselves as a one-stop shop, and I am not entirely sure how practical that is given how broad the space actually is. But there is real value in continuing to extend the menu of what you can do for a customer. Customers themselves have evolved dramatically over the last five to ten years, challenging what they consider core to their own operations versus what they are willing to bring in from outside in a collaborative fashion.
When you overlay the accelerator that comes from artificial intelligence (AI) on top of that trend, the whole notion of an ecosystem community is further strengthened. You need to continue expanding what you can do for your customers, to be agile, and to be deeply embedded with them in order to understand the challenges they are facing as they push forward on new frontiers. Some of the advanced therapies evolving today are forcing all of us to tackle challenges the industry has never solved before. For our customers to succeed, we have to innovate alongside them.
The transformation underway in how this space operates is not new, but it is accelerating, driven by the opportunities that AI and advances in automation are creating. What you see now, particularly in laboratory environments, is a shift from isolated, manual-intensive workflows to integrated, data-driven ecosystems powered by AI and real-time automation. Leading labs are breaking down the barriers between discovery, manufacturing, supply chain, and regulatory functions. In precision medicines and advanced therapies, that line is blurred. The real-time analytics coming from AI are giving a different level of visibility across the value chain, from design all the way through to manufacturing and scale-up, that simply did not exist before. At the core of all of this are things like sample preparation methodologies and how you can secure samples reliably and draw consistent insights from them. Those fundamentals have not changed. The speed and sophistication with which we address them has.
How are customer needs changing as the industry shifts toward precision medicines and advanced therapies?
When you think about rare diseases, personalized medicines, and advanced therapeutics such as cell and gene therapy, in many cases you are working with samples that may represent some of a patient’s last healthy cells. The need for sample integrity, system robustness, analytical accuracy, and reproducibility of results is significantly amplified compared to more familiar legacy therapies. The level of sophistication required is simply much higher.
This is precisely the gap PerkinElmer has built its integrated model to address. For us, it represents an opportunity to move from managing transactional relationships, where a customer deals separately with instrument vendors and service providers, to being a strategic partner. Through our OneSource offering, customers can work with us to manage their daily laboratory operations and equipment ecosystem as an integrated whole. Through Project Farma, they can work with us to design and build their advanced manufacturing facilities. Our Covaris acquisition complements both by embedding standardized, automation-ready sample preparation into laboratory and manufacturing environments, creating end-to-end continuity from sample collection to data analysis to decisions and insights.
This represents a fundamental shift from vendor relationships to true partnerships, where we jointly share accountability for outcomes and align our success with theirs. We measure that partnership in a concrete way: the hours we return to our customers’ scientists, freeing them to focus on the science behind life-saving treatments rather than on instrument maintenance and operational management. Across our OneSource operations, we are approaching one million hours returned. That is a milestone we are incredibly proud of.
You serve customers ranging from the largest global pharma companies to small, emerging biotechs. How do you manage those unique needs while still showing up as a strong partner to each customer group?
It really becomes a fit-for-purpose model. Everything we do is grounded in serving our customers, and whether they are large or small, the aim is to tailor our offering in a way that allows them to extract real value from it. The needs of a large customer can be very different from those of a smaller one, but the mission of what they are trying to accomplish is the same. It ultimately gets back to the science, and to which technologies and capabilities can unlock the most value for that specific organization at that specific stage.
One thing I have observed change markedly over time, is the importance of being willing to customize and tailor what you do, rather than bringing a fixed bundle to someone and hoping they see value in all of it. Being customer-focused and open to collaboration in how you support someone in their journey matters more now than it ever has.
PerkinElmer’ acquisition of Project Farma extended the company into the manufacturing support space. What is the strategic significance behind this investment and how do these added capabilities help address the challenge of taking an advanced therapy from laboratory innovation to commercial readiness?
When you talk about scaling these therapies, it is fundamentally about making innovation operational. The core challenge most customers face is that the processes, teams, and systems designed for discovery and research are rarely built for production, reliability, or scale. That risk manifests in three specific areas as companies move through the development process.
The first is translating the process that was working in the lab into a repeatable operation backed by standard work, validated methods, and controlled data that regulatory bodies around the world will accept, without losing momentum in the process. The second is the complexity of orchestrating these programs: delivering the facility itself, coordinating suppliers, delivering the technology, managing quality systems, and working across the different regulatory authorities that will inspect these facilities and provide sign-offs. Any misalignment between any one of those parties creates costly changes and delays. The third is building compliance and quality systems at the pace required to support scale-up from lab to production, without suffocating innovation or burying teams in bureaucracy.
Project Farma’s sweet spot is precisely this space. We are not the ones providing architectural drawings of the facilities, but we partner with our customers to ensure that what is being designed is built and installed in a way that can be commissioned, validated, operated, and sustained in compliance with regulatory authorities. Our role is to help clients move from idea to execution by solving the problems that sit between strategy and the reality of getting something on the ground that actually works. We are engaged across various engineering disciplines including project management, project controls, validation, quality and regulatory compliance, automation and digital enablement, and the operational excellence work required to stand these facilities up and keep them running. The goal is to make sure our customers’ factories start up on time, pass their inspections, and perform, and ultimately get medicines to patients around the world reliably.
Ultimately, every day a manufacturing facility is delayed is a day a patient waits. This is the urgency that drives everything we do in this part of the business.
Where do you see the most feasible near-term applications of AI across the biopharma development and commercialisation pipeline, and how is PerkinElmer deploying it within its own offering?
This is one of those once-in-a-generation technology shifts that all of us in this space are working to understand and leverage. We operate in a highly regulated marketplace, and deploying AI responsibly is not a secondary consideration, it is the primary frame. The opportunities, nevertheless, are significant.
We think about AI across two distinct layers, each creating a different kind of value.
The first is at the instrument level, where we are building AI capabilities directly into menu systems and user interfaces so customers can engage more collaboratively with our technologies. Intelligent parameter optimization, smarter batch execution, automated anomaly detection — these reduce the distance between sample and insight without adding complexity for the scientist. Concrete examples already in development include AI-driven optimization for our ICP-MS instruments and a smart report writer that converts raw analytical output into actionable recommendations. The second layer is inside our services operations. Through OneSource, we are deploying AI to predict and prescribe service events before problems arise, optimize laboratory inventory in real time, and surface intelligent purchase recommendations. This is where AI translates most directly into the operational continuity and reproducibility that biopharma customers depend on and is an often overlooked area that indirectly contributes to accelerating time-to-market of life saving treatments. Stepping back to the broader theme, biopharma has some catching up to do. Some core monoclonal antibody processes are still running as batch operations at a point where other mature industries have moved to fully closed-loop continuous manufacturing. The technology to change that largely exists. What the industry is working through is how to deploy it responsibly within a regulated environment. We intend to play a meaningful role in that transition, particularly through the operational and digital capabilities we have built through Project Farma.
A concrete example of what this looks like in practice today is our Digital Asset Genius tool, deployed through our OneSource Lab Solutions offering. This platform transforms a biopharma laboratory by automating 24-hour monitoring of instruments and environmental conditions, freezers, incubators, temperature, humidity, and a range of other variables that matter for quality and compliance, using wireless sensors feeding into cloud dashboards that generate real-time alerts. If there is a problem with a freezer housing sensitive samples, or if environmental conditions are drifting away from what reproducibility requires, the right person knows immediately. The utilization data that flows from a system like this also drives smarter capital expenditure decisions, workflow optimization, and better compliance reporting. It frees up scientist hours and scales from laboratory environments directly through to the production environment.
Within Project Farma, we are also intentionally embedding digital capabilities and investing in tools that help us execute better. We have a partnership with AI companies like valkit.ai that allows us to deliver projects faster, more consistently, and at lower cost by removing significant manual effort from processes aimed at enhancing data quality, accelerating decision-making, and facilitating technology transfer and start-up. We are not trying to become a software company, but we are building the capability to help clients solve serious digital and operational challenges by designing digital strategies, embedding automation in a compliant way, and translating data into operational readiness.
Looking two to three years ahead, what are the key priorities you are setting for PerkinElmer as the company’s new CEO?
I should acknowledge I am only a few of months into this role, but when I look at our pharma and life sciences ambitions, the focus is on executing a strategic roadmap that positions PerkinElmer as a leading pharmaceutical services provider with end-to-end infrastructure capabilities. There are important macro drivers shaping the future of life sciences that give me real confidence in that direction.
Pharma is going to need to scale in a fundamentally different way, given the nature of the technologies being developed today. Our Project Farma business positions us well to help customers navigate that. Cell and gene therapies are exciting, the promise is worth every bit of the investment being made in these platforms around the world. But they are not without their challenges, and in many ways where those platforms are today reminds me of where monoclonal antibodies were 20 to 25 years ago. We are at the far end of the maturity curve, meaning we are just getting started. Significant operational and cost challenges remain and addressing them will take time and sustained commitment from the entire ecosystem.
On the scientific workflow side, development and clinical trial processes are relying increasingly on full genome profiling, which puts a strong emphasis on high-throughput, standardized genomic workflows. We expect that to continue growing, and our Covaris acquisition is well positioned to help enable the scaling of those workflows.
The digital and AI dimension will continue to play an important role across everything we do. You are now starting to see more collaborations crossing from the technology world into life sciences, Nvidia partnering with pharma companies being a notable recent signal, and that confirms that AI-enabled solutions and infrastructure at the instrument level are not just important but actionable. Bringing those technologies together with our core analytical and service capabilities is critical to delivering on the mission we have set for ourselves.
It is an exciting time to be part of this industry, and an exciting time to be at PerkinElmer. There has been a great deal of transformation here over the last two to three years, and I am stepping in at a pivotal moment where we can leverage the investments made in infrastructure and the carve-out to double down on our innovation capabilities and bring some exciting technologies to market over the next one to two years and beyond.
The foundation is in place. The next chapter is about what we deliver for our customers, for the patients depending on the therapies we help bring to market, and for an industry that is moving faster than it ever has.
