From Emerging Modalities to R&D Priorities

“We're sitting front and center with the customers. We have a front seat to these challenges as they emerge, and that's really pushing us to think very differently.”

— Erin Chambers, Global Vice President & General Manager, Consumables & Lab Automation, Waters Corporation

With Waters investing simultaneously across GLP-1 peptides, lipid nanoparticles, mRNA, and antibody-drug conjugates, deciding where to commit R&D resources is not straightforward. Erin Chambers, global vice president and general manager of Waters Corporation's consumables and lab automation business, describes a landscape moving fast enough that, in her words, the industry doesn't always know what it doesn't know. Waters tracks emerging modalities, scientific breakthroughs, investment trends, and shifts in development pipelines, she says, but the clearest signal comes from customers themselves: when the same difficult analytical question starts showing up again and again, that pattern points to where innovation is needed next.

Waters currently has deep experience in GLP-1s, insulin-related compounds, lipid nanoparticles, and antibody-drug conjugates, while watching newer areas including bispecific and trispecific antibodies, antibody-oligo conjugates, DNA-based therapies, and cell-based therapies, each carrying its own risks and unresolved analytical questions. What she describes as a differentiator is a willingness to rethink the underlying technology rather than optimize around existing constraints, a capability she attributes to decades of fully integrated manufacturing experience and a granular understanding of how every parameter affects a separation. That proximity to customers, she says, is what pushes Waters to approach some of the industry's hardest, least-understood analytical problems differently rather than simply refining existing tools. Chambers describes Waters as sitting front and center with customers as these challenges first emerge, giving the company an early view of problems before they become widely recognized industry priorities, rather than reacting once a challenge is already well established across the field.

Chambers answered the following question:

• Waters is investing across GLP-1 peptides, LNPs, mRNA, ADCs, and more simultaneously. How do you make R&D allocation decisions when the science is still evolving so quickly — what signals are you watching?

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