In 2005, the ACS Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) and the global pharmaceutical corporations developed the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable to encourage the integration of green chemistry and green engineering into the pharmaceutical industry. The Roundtable has developed a list of key research areas. The purpose of this perspective is to summarise how that list was agreed, provide an assessment of the current state of the art in those areas and to highlight areas for future improvement.

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A considerable amount has been written about the use of metrics to drive business, government and communities towards more sustainable practices. A number of metrics have also been proposed over the past 5U10 years to make chemists aware of the need to change the methods used for chemical syntheses and chemical processes. This paper explores several metrics commonly used by chemists and compares and contrasts these metrics with a new metric known as reaction mass efficiency. The paper also uses an economic analysis of four commercial pharmaceutical processes to understand the relationship between metrics and the most important cost drivers in these processes.

Solvent use consistently accounts for between 80 and 90% of mass utilization in a typical pharmaceutical/fine chemicals (nonpolymer) batch chemical operation. Moreover, within these operations, solvents play a dominant role in the overall toxicity profile of any given process; i.e. on a mass basis, solvents account for the largest proportion of chemicals of concern used in the process. However, for the typical synthetic organic chemist, solvents are just a medium in which a reaction takes place; the interest is in the reactivity and building of a molecule, not in the means by which this is carried out. So, in a typical retrosynthetic analysis, solvent and solvent-reactant interactions, separability, and particle engineering are generally not included. The best means in which this reaction can take place is also not considered; i.e., the reaction space, configuration, order of addition, heat/mass transfer, etc., is generally not considered. This publication presents a case for greater awareness of solvent issues in batch chemical operations typically found in the pharmaceutical industry.

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