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Author: Christiana Briddell

ACS GCIPR: Strategic Planning and Roadmap Development for Sustainable Technology and Operations

The ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable stands at the forefront of promoting and implementing green chemistry and engineering within the pharmaceutical and allied industries (e.g., agricultural, animal health, etc.) to foster the UN sustainable goal of “Good Health and Well-Being.” For over two decades, the roundtable has advanced sustainable chemical innovations, catalyzed collaborations between industry and academia, and provided education and training in green chemistry and sustainability. This session offers a summary of achievements over the past 20 years and outlines future needs to deliver on our strategic outlook for the coming 20 years.

    Session Organizers: Juan Colberg, Pfizer; Dan Bailey, Takeda; Isamir Martinez, ACS Green Chemistry Institute.

    roadmap

    GC&E Conference

    Presented at the

    This session will be presented at the 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference, which will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 23-26, 2025. Call for abstracts is open January 3–February 14, 2025. For more information, see www.gcande.org.

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    Advancing Sustainable Processes in Pharma and Allied Industries via Green Chemistry Innovations

    This symposium highlights outstanding research, applications, and innovations from industry and academia that demonstrate compelling environmental, safety, and efficiency improvements over current technologies. Speakers are invited by the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR), the leading global organization dedicated to advancing green chemistry and engineering in pharma and allied industries.

    In this symposium, you will hear from recent award winners and recipients of academic research grants from the GCIPR, including:

    • Winner(s) of the Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry
    • Winner of the CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award
    • Winner of the Data Science and Modeling for Green Chemistry Award
    • Winner of the new Green Discovery Chemistry Award
    • Plus, novel innovations that have been developed and incentivized through our grants program

    Session Organizers: Paul Richardson, Pfizer; Michael Kopach, Lilly; Isamir Martinez, ACS Green Chemistry Institute.

    GC&E Conference

    Presented at the

    This session will be presented at the 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference, which will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 23-26, 2025. Call for abstracts is open January 3–February 14, 2025. For more information, see www.gcande.org.

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    Greener Reaction Systems for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

    To meet the global health challenges of the future and advance the goal of good health and well-being for all, the pharmaceutical industry must find ways to minimize the human health and environmental impacts of producing medicines. Conventional methods to produce synthetic medicines are solvent-intensive and often rely on hazardous substances leading to climate and pollution impacts across the pharmaceutical supply chain. There is therefore an urgent need for more sustainable synthetic methods in pharmaceutical manufacturing. This session will explore recent advances in alternative reaction systems that offer sustainability advantages over conventional solvent-intensive systems. Topics may include chemistry in water, biocatalysis, mechanochemistry, electrochemistry, and photochemistry. The session will focus on recent work to overcome practical challenges to applying these reaction systems in pharmaceutical manufacturing. In particular, speakers will highlight the vital role of analytical chemistry in confirming product integrity, purity, and waste stream assessment to enable implementation of these new and emerging technologies.

    Session Organizers: Dan Bailey, Takeda; Nnamdi Akporji, Merck; Matt Osborne, AstraZeneca

    GC&E Conference

    Presented at the

    This session will be presented at the 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference, which will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 23-26, 2025. Call for abstracts is open January 3–February 14, 2025. For more information, see www.gcande.org.

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    Greening the Pharma Supply Chain: Innovations for Early, Intermediate, and Raw Material Processes

    Sustainability requires collective efforts from all of us to innovate in the face of declining natural resources. To this end, our symposium aims to showcase cutting-edge green chemistry innovations in the production of structure-complex building blocks or intermediates to minimize environmental footprint (scope 3 emissions). The session will highlight contributions from UNDP/EPA, pharma, biotech, CROs, CDMOs, and academic researchers on the more efficient and sustainable ways to manufacture early intermediates/raw materials. Topics included but not limited to:

    • ESG and carbon neutrality 2030 goal.
    • Case studies from CROs/CDMOs and pharma/Biotech companies demonstrating the impact of green chemistry innovations.
    • Academic insights into challenging yet critical chemical transformations in the building block space. Innovations relevant to various focus areas, including flow chemistry, catalysis/biocatalysis, chemistry in water, peptide synthesis, and nucleotide chemistry.
    • Pharmaceutical/biotech’s investigation and sourcing strategy of building blocks.
    • Strategies for selectively synthesizing complex molecules, such as highly substituted benzenes or asymmetric synthesis of small chiral molecules not accessible from the chiral pool, which are often overlooked but essential in process chemistry.

    Session Organizers: Feng Peng, Merck; David Leahy, Biohaven; ZhenZhen Dong, PharmaBlock; Thorsten Rosner, J-Star Research/Porton.

    GC&E Conference

    Presented at the

    This session will be presented at the 29th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference, which will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 23-26, 2025. Call for abstracts is open January 3–February 14, 2025. For more information, see www.gcande.org.

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    Practical Green Chemistry Tools and Techniques for Research & Development Scientists

    This workshop will equip industry-based R&D chemists and engineers as well as graduate students with practical Green Chemistry tools, methods, and metrics. The content of this workshop will cover green chemistry basics through to the most recent innovative tools and metrics widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. The workshop will be tailored toward scientists and engineers working in batch chemical operations in common use within the pharma industry, but the tools may be applied to other allied chemical industries (e.g. agriscience and animal health).

    What you will learn:

    • Fundamentals of green chemistry and engineering
    • Tools that the pharmaceutical, agriscience, and animal health industries routinely use to optimize their synthetic chemical processes.
    • How to use these tools to make “greener” decisions in synthetic drug design and process development
    • Real-world applications from experienced pharma industry process development chemists

    LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP.

    group photo at workshop

    ACS Fall 2025

    Presented at the

    This workshop will be next presented at ACS Fall 2025, which will be held in Washington, DC, on August 17–21, 2025. For more information, see the meeting website at www.acs.org. Register for the workshop when you register for the conference.

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    Sustainable Manufacturing Process for Commercial and Developmental Stage Intermediates through Two Consecutive Flow Reactions using Micro-packed Bed Technology

    2024 CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award

    The PharmaBlock team was selected based on their innovative work on “Sustainable Manufacturing Process for Commercial and Developmental Stage Intermediates through Two Consecutive Flow Reactions using Micro-Packed Bed Technology.” Team members are Feng Zhang, Guangchao Ma, Dafen Wen, Yang Zhu, and Yuanxian Wang, all based in Nanjing, China. Their project demonstrated the use of micro-packed bed technology to produce tert-Butyl 3-oxoazetidine-1-carboxylate and tert-Butyl 3-aminoazetidine-1-carboxylate through oxidation reactions and reductive amination reactions at scale, resulting in improvements to safety, equipment volume efficiency, process mass intensity (PMI), greenness, and cost efficiency.

    Pharmablock reactor equipment.

    More about the Award

    The CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award seeks to recognize outstanding efforts by CMO companies in pharmaceutical green chemistry in support of pharmaceutical research, development, and manufacturing that demonstrate compelling environmental, safety, and/or efficiency improvements. The award recognizes greener advances in synthetic route development for starting materials, intermediates, or active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), including reaction conditions and chemical or manufacturing technologies.

    This annual award is presented at the Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference where a member of the winning team is invited to share their team’s innovations. 

    Pictured: Wang Yuanxian, Director of R&D at PharmaBlock, accepts the 2024 CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award from Isamir Martinez (ACSGCI) and ACS GCIPR 2024 Co-Chair, Dan Bailey of Takeda.

    PharmaBlock accepts award.

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