The biopharmaceutical industry’s core mission is the uninterrupted delivery of high-quality, efficacious drugs. At the same time, the industry is under pressure to make production as sustainable as possible. To achieve these dual goals, biopharmaceutical companies must be willing to use innovative bioprocessing technologies and embrace the human-centric ideas of the emerging “Industry 5.
0” model, according to new research. The , by a team at the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London in the U.K.
, examined industry efforts to move toward net zero, socially sustainable, and eco-efficient operations. One key finding is that, although it is hard to quantify process sustainability at present, new digital tools are being developed to help drug companies better understand their environmental impact. “Currently, it is challenging to pinpoint more or less sustainable products if we consider that processes are product-specific and also differ on a company-basis,” according to lead author Miriam Sarkis, a doctoral student.
“The good news is that model-based tools to answer this question exist and have been developed to tackle case studies for other industries.” “With the recent growing interest in sustainability within biopharma, we are surely going to see a larger volume of comparative studies screen production pathways for a range of products.” Quantification difficulties aside, the researchers also identified some other common chal.
