Pharmaceuticals comprise a variety of compounds designed to guarantee safe and effective therapies. The active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) are those that deliver the beneficial health effects. The goal of the project is to develop greener methodologies for APIs that simultaneously reduce the environmental footprint and the dependence on third countries for API production. The TransPharm project delivers digital tools, also based on artificial intelligence, for the development of greener pharmaceutical products and APIs, as well as models to judge their impact. The result should lead to a more independent and competitive European pharmaceutical industry, which can ensure the timely delivery of green therapeutics in the future.
Starting from literature data bases, artificial intelligence methods are used to extract relevant data to predict important features of molecules which are of major importance for API’s. Several characteristics of the molecules are being predicted such as solubility, but also the biodegradability of compounds. This feature is crucial to develop greener pharmaceuticals that degrade more readily and more completely in the environment leading to better surface water quality. Further, much effort is being focused on developing more sustainable methods to prepare API’s. This involves methods to reduce the formation of hazardous residues, but attention is also paid to develop continuous flow and telescoped methods to reduce the footprint of the synthesis methods.
However, the footprint/handprint of the pharmaceutical sector is not only created by the production, also other aspects have to be accounted for which are less obvious, such as the impact of limited biodegradability, long term health benefits, local legal constraints, spatial distribution of environmental impact... Therefore, a holistic Life Cycle Assessment is being developed to evaluate the sustainability of pharmaceuticals. This assessment will take also into account the ecotoxicological profile which will be based on medium / high throughput research.
The project is performed in close collaboration with all stakeholders of the process in order to judge the drive and the economic viability to transition towards greening the pharmaceutical sector.
The TransPharm project aims at developing greener pharmaceutical production schemes which favours the production in Europe and to contribute to the logistic difficulties of the sector.
The pharmaceutical sector is coping with a number of important challenges at the moment. These challenges range from logistic problems to provide the required APIs to patients, over environmental issues related to residues in surface water and hazardous residues, leading to high development costs directing the API production to low-income countries. Also, the stimulation of the use of generic drugs by several national governments leads to a potential reduction of investments by major pharmaceutical companies. These concerns were also discussed with the project officer and EU representatives during the meeting of the sister projects in Brussels on December 10th, 2024.
The objective of the TransPharm project is to contribute to most of the above challenges by greening the pharmaceutical production and optimizing production methods in order to reduce the footprint of the pharmaceutical sector and to try to bring back some of the API production to Europe by stimulating more regional production. This should lead to a more secure supply and to a better situation for patients in Europe.
