Advancing green chemistry for more sustainable medicines

Yongda Zhang, PhD, Distinguished Research Fellow in Process Research, and his team believe that making life-changing medicines shouldn’t be at the expense of the environment. So, they set out to create an innovative and more sustainable manufacturing process for Spiroketone, a common building block used in our oncology research and development projects. This essential Spiroketone is not commercially available and producing it has been time-consuming, inefficient, costly – and created a significant environmental impact. Until now.

The new process reduces waste, cuts the use of organic solvents, saves water – and for that, the team received the prestigious 2024 Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry. The award established by the American Chemical Society recognizes excellence in the research, development, and execution of green chemistry that demonstrates compelling environmental, safety, and efficiency improvements¹.

Chart showing sustainability achievements for Spiroketone — Sustainability improvements of the innovative process for manufacturing Boehringer’s Spiroketone over the original process. For 3000 kg of Spiroketone, the new process reduced overall waste by 98%, water by 76%, organic solvents by 99%, and the carbon footprint by 95% (equivalent to taking 9,600 cars off the road for one year)2. Carbon footprint is the measure of carbon emissions associated with the production of a given compound (kg CO2 equivalents)3. Additionally, the new process reduced costs by 99% and decreased the production time from 52 to 8 weeks.

A passion for green chemistry

You could say, Zhang has a passion for being green. Since he joined Boehringer in 2004, he has been implementing the principles of green chemistry in Boehringer projects ever since.

“Green chemistry provides the opportunity for us to move projects faster and meet our ambitious timelines, while minimizing the environmental footprint of our medicines,” he says. “In this case, by having a shorter synthesis route and increasing process efficiency, we can be faster, generate less waste and reduce costs. It is really a triple win situation.”

It used to take one year to produce ten kilograms (kg) of Spiroketone at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars/kg. Zhang and his team improved the chemical yield nearly five-fold and reduced the production time to just eight weeks for 1,000 kg with a 99% decrease in cost.

His colleague, Eugene Chong, PhD, Principal Scientist, sees the potential for their work to have a long-lasting, positive impact on the environment and society.

“It is our motivation to develop shorter routes for chemical processes to reduce our medicine’s environmental impact and be faster for patients. We also hope to inspire other scientists to implement shorter and more direct routes in process development and to innovate towards sustainability in general.” Chong shares.

Photo of chemical development team — The team from Chemical Development, Ridgefield (U.S.), which won the 2024 Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry. From left to right: Dr. Jon C. Lorenz (Senior Research fellow), Dr. Linglin Wu (Associate Director), Dr. Yongda Zhang (Distinguished Research Fellow), Dr. Eugene Chong (Principal Scientist), Jada A. H. White (Scientist III), Dr. Suttipol Radomkit (Principal Scientist) and Yibo Xu (Principal Scientist).

Making more sustainable medicines through eco-design and green chemistry

Eco-design aims to integrate environmental aspects into product design and development with the goal of reducing the environmental footprint throughout all stages of a medicine’s lifecycle. Green chemistry, a component of eco-design, is a way of designing chemical products and processes with minimal resource use and waste, while avoiding hazardous substances. ⁴

We aim to reduce the environmental footprint of our medicines, by minimizing energy and water use, as well as the carbon footprint and waste created. To achieve this, we strive to integrate eco-design and green chemistry principles across all stages of our medicine's lifecycle. Learn more about our journey towards making more sustainable medicines.

References

Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry - American Chemical Society (acs.org)
Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle | US EPA
Uusitalo, V., Grönman, K., Kasurinen, H., Väisänen, S., Soukka, R. (2023). Carbon Footprint. In: Idowu, S.O., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25984-5_1054
12 Principles of Green Chemistry - American Chemical Society. https://www.acs.org/greenchemistry/principles/12-principles-of-green-chemistry.html. (b) Anastas, P. T., Warner, J. C. Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, Oxford University Press: New York, 1998, p.30.