To address environmental concerns surrounding bioprocessing, companies must be proactive. In a recent preprint, Andrew Sinclair, president and founder of U.K.-based Biopharm Services, which is a consulting firm for biopharmaceutical manufacturers, and his colleagues described “the urgent need to mitigate the climate crisis through actionable strategies in the biopharmaceuticals sector.” As these experts pointed out, manufacturing biologics produces enough carbon emissions to have a “significant environmental impact.”
Achieving the most effective reduction in the environmental impact of a bioprocess, though, depends on making that a priority from the start. By using bioprocess eco-design metrics, such as process mass intensity (PMI) and other methods, a manufacturer can predict a process’s carbon footprint.
To take an approach based on eco-design metrics, Sinclair’s team applied his company’s BioSolve Process software application. It can be used, the team noted, for techno-economic assessment and to compare a bioprocess to “existing industry benchmarks to critically assess PMI’s capacity to inform eco-friendly design choices in manufacturing monoclonal antibody bulk drug substance.”
As these scientists explained, though, PMI alone does not meet all the needs for assessing a bioprocess’s environmental impact. For example, they pointed out that PMI does not consider energy usage, which Sinclair’s team called “a significant oversight given the energy-intensive nature of cleanroom operations.”
Based on several studies and comparisons described in their report, Sinclair and his colleagues showed that PMI works well for predicting water and plastic usage when manufacturing a biologic. For a complete life-cycle assessment of the environmental impact of manufacturing a biologic, however, PMI must be combined with a measurement of carbon usage.
“The roles of alternative metrics or commercial software such as BioSolve Process are pivotal in advancing the environmental sustainability of biologics manufacturing,” Sinclair and his colleagues concluded. “By embracing these tools and methodologies, the biopharmaceutical industry can make significant strides toward minimizing its carbon footprint and contributing to global sustainability goals.”
