Perspectives on Sustainability in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Around the world, pharmaceutical companies and their industrial and academic partners stand firm in their commitment to the application of green chemistry principles, tools, and metrics. However, new challenges continue to emerge as the industry seeks to compress development timelines and extend portfolios to newer and more complex modalities. In this work, we share perspectives from across the industry on establishing science-based targets and building laboratory culture that empowers sustainability-forward process development decisions. Effective direction of development decisions requires selecting appropriate metrics for the stage and scope of the process, and we explore solutions and current challenges to addressing this problem, including the extension of sustainability concepts beyond small molecules and into therapeutic peptides, oligonucleotides, and biologics.