Making a single kilogram of a typical medicine creates 100 kilograms of hazardous waste, most of it used-up solvent. This project, called SolvIT, aims to slash that waste by redesigning the solvents and the manufacturing process together, rather than treating each chemical step in isolation. The problem is that pharmaceutical production is staggeringly inefficient—roughly 1,000 times more wasteful per kilogram of product than oil refining. Each step in synthesising a drug often requires a different solvent, many of which are toxic and costly to dispose of. SolvIT will use computer modelling and targeted experiments to identify greener solvents for the most common reactions used in drug-making, then design integrated processes that “telescope” multiple steps together, cutting both solvent use and production time. If successful, the work could lower the cost of medicines and make their manufacture far more sustainable. The impact would be felt in the supply chains and manufacturing plants that quietly produce the drugs people rely on, reducing environmental harm without compromising quality. The team will also work with pharmaceutical companies and regulators to identify barriers to solvent recycling and help overcome them.
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It may be surprising to learn, but the pharmaceutical industry is around 1000 times worse than oil refining in terms of waste generated per kg of product; the industry produces around 100kg of hazardous waste per kg of product, most of which is solvent. The proposed "SolvIT" bid will build on existing collaborations between Strathclyde and Imperial College in the area of modelling and solvent design, whilst strengthening the team with new collaborative partners, to tackle this colossal amount of waste. Our vision is to improve efficiency and reduce waste in the manufacture of new and existing medicines, lowering their cost, and making their production more sustainable and environmentally friendly. We plan to do this through three main programmes of work: 1. The identification and deployment of sustainable solvents in medicines manufacture: most medicines require multiple operations (steps) to go from bulk raw material to final active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). At each step, a different solvent is often required. These solvents may be toxic and costly to dispose of, isolation of products at each step, also incurring solvent use, adds to the cost. SolvIT will use a combination of computer modelling and experiment to evaluate alternative solvents, which are more sustainable, in the most popular chemical reactions used in the synthesis of new medicines, so that new and existing process can use these new solvents, reducing waste and cost. 2. Integrated solvent and process design: building on the outputs from the first objective, we will again combine computational modelling approaches with process design, driven by a range of key metrics, to allow multiple steps in the medicine production to be combined, or "telescoped", minimising the waste that is generated, and reducing time to production, resulting in overall cost savings from both of these improvements. 3. Stakeholder engagement: we will engage with pharmaceutical company partners, and industry regulators, to better understand from them the current barriers to solvent recycling and communicate to them new developments emerging from this work which may help to overcome these barriers. The integration of these strands of research, along with the collaborative expertise from the two partner institutions, across disciplines of synthetic chemistry, computational chemistry, and chemical engineering, will deliver findings that will be of benefit across pharmaceutical industry in particular, and the chemicals manufacturing space in general.
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