Focus Areas

Aligning and harmonizing sustainability strategies from the API synthesis and manufacture to high-level corporate sustainability strategies and accounting is a new focus area in the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roudntable. Green chemistry metrics are a key area of discussion, and defining the next generation of metrics and tools that will allow for this seemless strategy is an objective of this effort.

Predictive in silico tools have the potential to revolutionize the way scientists approach chemical challenges and accelerate the identification of sustainable technology. These tools can be used to identify new and more sustainable chemical processes and materials. For example, machine learning models can be trained on large datasets of chemical reactions to identify patterns and relationships between reaction conditions and outcomes that enable more efficient and sustainable production of active ingredients throughout the industry.

Analytical Chemistry is fundamental to many activities across the pharmaceutical industry. Strategies to advance green analytical chemistry include emphasizing and prioritizing the innovation, development, and application of methods, techniques, and approaches that minimize the use of hazardous substances, reduce energy consumption, and generate less waste across our chemistry discipline.

Arguably, the future of catalysis in the pharmaceutical industry is to be found in biocatalysis. Recent work in directed evolution and molecular engineering have enabled the development of asymmetric chiral coupling reactions and other catalytic reactions that far exceed the capabilities of transition metal catalysts, don’t involve the use of rare metals, and are far greener from multiple perspectives. Roundtable member companies have organized to share best practices and advance biocatalytic technology.

The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable develops practical workflows and tools to measure and predict API biodegradation and persistence, then shares these with medicinal chemists who can then choose environmentally benign clinical candidates.

Oligonucleotides are a novel class of therapeutic molecule for the treatment of a wide variety of diseases. They are short pieces of modified DNA, typically around 20 nucleotides in length. Typical oligonucleotide manufacturing processes have a significant environmental cost in terms of waste, chemical hazards, and energy efficiency, and this burden will only grow as volumes of therapeutic oligonucleotides increase. Recently, the emphasis on integrating green chemistry and engineering principles into oligonucleotide production has increased, with a growing focus on environmentally friendly oligonucleotide manufacture within the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharmaceutical industry has an increasingly global supply chain. Therefore the complete sustainability profile of an API extends through the supply chain to include what is known as “Scope 3 emissions”. The ACS GCI Pharmacuetical Roundtable’s Supply Chain team strives to influence the raw material and building block vendors by promoting green chemistry innovations in this space.