Green chemistry can reap benefits throughout drug development and manufacturing.
By Berkeley W. Cue Jr., Ph.D., BWC Pharma Consulting LLC; and Julie B. Manley, Guiding Green LLC
The mission of the R&D-based pharmaceutical industry is to discover and develop new medicines that will enable patients to live longer, healthier, and more productive lives. Today, there is a growing realization within the pharmaceutical community that this commitment to health is incomplete without a commitment to a healthy environment. So pharmaceutical scientists are turning to green chemistry to design medicines to continue to be efficacious and high quality, yet with less impact on the environment. Green chemistry is a way of looking at the design of drug molecules and the processes to make them that reduces or eliminates the use and generation of hazardous substances and is achieved by following a set of twelve principles (Table 1). It is also catching the attention of senior executives who are seeing the “green” ($) in green chemistry.