The pharma industry in on track to adopting more sustainable practices

Like corporate social responsibility, green chemistry is a field in which it is easy for big firms to make big declarations (and to employ a range of different metrics and measurements) without taking much action. Companies also tend to refer enquiries to the corporate website rather than answer questions directly. But changes are happening, some of which have become part of the mainstream.

Pharmaceutical companies have switched the manufacturing processes of several well-established medicines — including the diabetes drug sitagliptin, the malaria treatment artemisinin and the painkiller ibuprofen — to less environmentally damaging ones in recent years.

At the University of Nottingham, the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratories for Sustainable Chemistry project officially opened its laboratory in February 2017, backed by a £12m fund from the pharmaceutical company. The building is estimated to use around a third of the power of a conventional chemistry laboratory and consume far less water.

The ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable, which was set up in 2005, now has more than 20 members, including AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Eli Lilly. Its activities include maintaining a research programme and the production of guidelines and standards across a range of chemical processes, as well as hosting the annual Green Chemistry Challenge Awards, intended for ‘groundbreaking scientific solutions to real-world environmental problems’. The 2021 winners included Merck, for developing a more sustainable manufacturing process for the chronic cough medicine gefapixant citrate (see Box) and Bristol Myers Squibb, for a new class of sustainable reagents (substances used to cause a chemical reaction).

Merck was a winner in 2020 too; this time for a more sustainable, cost-effective and safer manufacturing process for the antiviral drug uprifosbuvir. Merck developed a catalyst that can be used to synthesise uprifosbuvir with very high purity in just two reaction steps and says the new process results in greater than 75% improvements in process mass intensity — a measure of process efficiency for biopharmaceutical production — energy use, water depletion and other metrics, compared with the first-generation synthesis pathway.

“The manufacturers of generic drugs are starting to work in [the green chemistry] space too,” Clark adds. “That’ll be interesting in the future. There’s an assumption that these firms are ‘cheap and cheerful’ but I think they are showing signs of being rather more responsible.”