Pharmacos ink green manufacturing pact with EU academics
pharmafile | December 3, 2012 | News story | Manufacturing and Production |Â Â Bayer, EU, Pharmacos, SanofiÂ
A group of top pharma multinationals have set up a public-private partnership dedicated to the development of manufacturing sustainable pharmaceuticals with academic groups across Europe.
The CHEM21 project is being led by GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Manchester and aims to develop sustainable biological and chemical alternatives to finite materials, such as precious metals, which are currently used as catalysts in the manufacture of medicines.
All told, the project involves six pharmaceutical companies, 13 universities and four small to medium enterprises (SMEs) from across Europe, and has a budget of €26.4 million over four years.
The project members note that by applying biocatalysis to the manufacturing processes for medicines, the initiative could “limit the drain on the world’s resources and have a lasting benefit on the environment”.
In addition to GSK, the pharma companies involved in the project are Bayer, the UK arm of Pfizer, Sanofi, Johnson & Jonson’s Janssen Pharmaceutica unit and Orion Corporation of Finland.
CHEM21 got underway in October and will run initially for four years with funding from the European Commission’s Innovative Medicines Initiative.
The project will establish a European research hub to act as a source of up-to-date information on green chemistry. It will also develop training packages to ensure that the principles of sustainable manufacturing are embedded in the education of future scientists.
GSK’s senior vice president of platform technologies and science, John Baldoni, said the initiative has the potential to “not only reduce our industry’s carbon footprint, but … provide savings that can be reinvested in the development of new medicines, increase access to medicines through cost reduction and drive innovations that will simplify and transform our manufacturing paradigm”.
Baldoni set up an idea-harvesting group in GSK called The Seekers, which tries to find new and transformative approaches to R&D by thinking about the process of innovation in new and potentially disruptive ways. The CHEM21 initiative has been born in part from the Seeker programme.
Prof Nicholas Turner from The University of Manchester believes CHEM21 represents a unique opportunity for academic groups to work alongside pharmaceutical companies and specialist SMEs.
“We believe that challenging problems of this nature are best solved on a pan-European basis by bringing together under one roof the combined expertise of many groups to establish a world-class research hub in catalysis and sustainable chemical synthesis”, he said.
Phil Taylor
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