Opinion: A plan for incentivizing green chemistry in research

Though my academic background featured green chemistry staples like biocatalysis, click chemistry, and asymmetric catalysis, I didn’t start my industrial green chemistry journey until I was 8 years into my career. That’s when I got engaged with initiatives at my employer, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. I was fortunate that the program at Pfizer encompassed discovery chemistry. Working with other groups within the company, I became involved with the cross-site program and later with the American Chemical Society’s GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR), a consortium of about 50 companies collaborating precompetitively with the objective of catalyzing green chemistry and engineering within the global pharmaceutical industry. (C&EN is published by ACS but is editorially independent.)

The Pfizer program is entering its 25th year of implementing greener technologies in both R&D and manufacturing operations. I am one of the cochairs of the GCIPR. In addition, I participate in initiatives to understand how organizations are seeking to reduce their carbon footprints, establish sustainable supply chains, and embrace new chemical technologies with the goal of reducing the environmental burden of their operations while continuing to address global health-care needs in an equitable manner.

These corporate goals are both impressive and laudable, but for a chemist joining the pharmaceutical industry in a discovery-based role, the challenges of contributing to meeting them through the robust application of green chemistry principles rapidly become apparent. They include the high risk and costs associated with drug development, restricted intellectual property, and the need to move quickly within a highly competitive environment.

These factors loom large enough in the early phases of drug discovery that individual scientists might conclude that the way they carry out their chemistry is inconsequential from a green chemistry perspective and that their main objective is isolation of a product. If the material proves to be of sufficient interest for further evaluation, somebody else will “fix” the synthesis.

But in fact, green syntheses start with the R&D scientist. We must incentivize the implementation of green chemistry within industrial drug discovery laboratories—and below I lay out REAP (reward, educate, align, partner), a four-point system for doing that. But at the same time, it is critical to change the common mentality that green chemistry involves a series of “rules” that potentially hinder innovation. This is not the case, and a compelling argument can be made for the opposite: that the principles of green chemistry provide fertile ground for true sustainable innovation.

Reward

A critical component of incentivizing R&D scientists to embrace green chemistry is to recognize and reward their achievements in the space. This can be done via numerous mechanisms, such as internal awards dedicated to green chemistry. One issue is that these awards typically recognize improvements in existing processes and are hard to apply to early-stage research discoveries. Moreover, compared with the academic community, industry offers fewer awards that recognize advances in green chemistry. Over the past several years, the GCIPR has started to change this status quo by establishing awards for sustainable achievements in large- and small-molecule syntheses, artificial intelligence and machine learning, industrial discovery chemistry, and work done with external partners.

Educate

One key to incentivizing the uptake of green chemistry in drug discovery is firmly embedding sustainability into the culture, both internally and with external partners. New hires should get training (such as the GCIPR’s Green Chemistry and Engineering Learning Platform) in an organization’s sustainability objectives. An emphasis should be placed on applying green chemistry metrics to benchmark chemistries as they are being developed. This will help address what I see as a generational awareness gap regarding the importance of sustainability in the pharmaceutical research community. Chemists just out of school often have a better understanding of the world’s sustainability issues than they have of their own field’s. Among industrial chemists, the reverse can be the case: green chemistry is often recognized within the processes they develop but its connection to real-world impact can be lost.

Align

Key to scientists’ successful application of green chemistry principles in their day-to-day research is providing a clear line of sight to how the principles align with their organization’s sustainability goals. There is often a perceived disconnect between green and sustainable chemistry, the view being that the former is focused on minimizing waste generation and the latter on operational efficiency and preserving natural resources. In fact, green chemistry is a critical component of sustainable chemistry, and an individual’s contribution can be aligned to that of the broader organization by making clear what sustainability looks like within a specific role. Laboratory evaluations or benchmarking programs offered by groups such as My Green Lab can lead to tangible improvements in areas like water conservation, energy savings, and recycling.

Partner

A chemist’s commitment to applying the principles of green chemistry will translate into results only if their work is shared and put to use. The good news is that opportunities exist to do this. Inside companies, scientists can network with colleagues in environmental, health, and safety and supply chain groups. Externally, for activities such as tool development, publication, and symposia organization, the GCIPR can connect folks to others in the industry. But recent interviews conducted by the GCIPR found that companies don’t always value the work of employees within the roundtable. The challenge for those employees is to communicate that value back to their organizations—including the contribution to corporate sustainability goals that green chemistry and GCIPR can offer. Companies can achieve a classic win-win by providing both a development opportunity for the participating colleague and the corporate-wide benefit of learnings and initiatives in a precompetitive space. Involvement in the roundtable and other green chemistry activities should be considered part of an employee’s development rather than an extracurricular activity.

I hope it’s clear that embracing a REAP approach to green chemistry in drug discovery provides benefits not only for individuals in terms of scientific growth and networking opportunities but also for organizations striving to meet sustainability objectives while meeting the health needs of humanity in an equitable and environmentally responsible manner.

Paul Richardson is a director in oncology medicinal chemistry at Pfizer.

Views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of C&EN or the ACS.

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