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By Vittoria Valentine, Program Specialist, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Industry Awards. These awards honor advancements in green chemistry within the pharmaceutical sector and related industries, as well as their global supply chains.
“Recognition of industrial scientists contributing to more sustainable practices is an evolutionary opportunity to both acknowledge scientific advancement and to propagate next-generation scientific improvements throughout the industry,” said John Tucker, Executive Director for Neurocrine Biosciences and GCIRP Awards Team Co-lead. “The awards are judged by some of the brightest minds in the industry and have expanded to encompass small and large molecule process chemistry, medicinal chemistry, AI and machine learning, and include the global CDMO supply chain. They track and inspire the march toward greater sustainability through the application of superior scientific innovation.”
2025 Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry and Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry, established in 2016, honors exceptional industrial applications of innovative green chemistry and engineering in the pharmaceutical sector. This award recognizes projects that demonstrate significant improvements in environmental impact, safety, cost-efficiency, or overall effectiveness compared to existing technologies.
The Merck team, consisting of Patrick Fier, Patrick Moon, Scott McCann, Tao Liang, Greg Estrada, Marc Poirier, Reed Larson, Lu Wang, Gao Shang, and Fuh-Rong Tsay, received this award for their work, “From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: Developing a Sustainable and Scalable Manufacturing Process for a Complex ADC Drug-Linker”. They demonstrated the impact of applying green chemistry principles in the manufacturing process of the linker for the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) Sacituzumab tirumotecan (MK-2870). Originally, the manufacturing process had long lead times due to the 20-step synthetic sequence and faced a major bottleneck with the final purification that limited production to less than 100 g per month even with 24/7 operation in a high-potency chromatography suite. Major improvements were achieved by developing a synthesis from a widely available natural product that cut seven potent steps down to three. The Process Mass Intensity (PMI) was reduced by approximately 75%, and the amount of energy-intensive chromatography time was decreased by >99% compared to the original route. This work highlights the advantages of investing in greener and more sustainable processes that naturally improve the global supply of medicines to patients.
2025 Peter J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry & Engineering Impact in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Corteva was awarded for “A Sustainably-Designed Manufacturing Process to Adavelt™ Active from Renewable Feedstocks.” The Corteva team clearly demonstrated the design of an efficient manufacturing process for Adavelt™ active, with sustainability as a core focus. They adopted green chemistry principles to maximize yield, reduce waste, and deliver a cost-effective solution for farmers. Building upon the first-generation supply route, they developed a process that eliminated three protecting groups, four steps, the use of precious metals, and replaced undesirable reagents with greener alternatives while producing an active ingredient effective against 20 diseases in over 30 crops.
Their manufacturing process reduced waste generation by 92% and incorporates three renewable feedstocks (furfural, alanine and ethyl lactate), increasing the renewable carbon content for the active ingredient to 41% compared to the first-generation process. The Corteva team includes Nicholas Babij, Nakyen Choy, Megan Cismesia, David Couling, Nicole Hough, Yamini Krishnan, Caroline Long, Adriane Miller, Mark Muehlfeld, and Greg Whiteker.
2025 CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award Winner
The CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award seeks to recognize outstanding efforts by CMO companies in pharmaceutical green chemistry in support of pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing that demonstrate compelling improvements in environmental impact, safety, and efficiency.
Olon S.p.A is awarded on their innovative work, “Recombinant DNA technology and chimeric protein expression for sustainable production of therapeutic peptides by microbial fermentation.” Leveraging their expertise in microbial fermentation, Olon S.p.A. has developed a flexible manufacturing platform for the synthesis of peptide therapeutics. This novel technology synthesizes peptides using microbial fermentation (rDNA expression), leading to reduced solvent and toxic material usage, as well as minimizing excess building blocks by using no protecting groups. This improving the overall PMI compared to the existing Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis (SPPS) methods. Moreover, as part of their platform, a Master Cell Bank (MCB) significantly reduces the lead time for manufacturing since the cells can be logarithmically proliferated to maximize the yield of desired product in the fermenter. They are adapting their novel Fermentation Platform towards commercial GLP-1 peptides and non-GLP-1 peptides. Olon's novel Fermentation Platform can help address the growing global demand for peptide therapeutics while employing the principles of green chemistry. The team consists of Piera Fonte, Gian Luca Bertetti, Antonella Malcangi, Alberto Oppedisano, Mattia Stucchi, Marianna Lembo, Guido Trione, Eleonora Amante, Giuseppe Borrelli, and Giuseppe Ferrante.
Data Science and Modeling for Green Chemistry Award Winner
The Data Science and Modeling for Green Chemistry award aims to recognize the research and development of computational tools that guide the design of sustainable chemical processes and the execution of green chemistry that demonstrates compelling environmental, safety, and efficiency improvements over current technologies in the pharmaceutical industry and its allied industrial partners.
The Merck and Sunthetics team, consisting of Kevin Stone, Daniela E. Blanco, Kaitlyn Brinza, Melodie Christensen, Shane Grosser, Yasser Khelalef, Abderrahman Lazizi, Andy Liaw, Spencer McMinn, Rafik Oulbsir, Victor Schultz, Ethan Tenison, César A. Urbina-Blanco, Ajit Vikram, and Yuting Xu, is awarded for their work, “Algorithmic Process Optimization (APO) for Pharmaceutical Development.” This technology makes use of state-of-the-art approaches in active learning, including Bayesian Optimization, to locate global optima in complex operational spaces that are expensive to evaluate experimentally. The Merck and Sunthetics team developed and demonstrated the APO technology allows for sustainable process design by minimizing material use and selecting non-toxic reagents, translating into reductions of the drug development costs. APO's versatility allows it to tackle numeric, discrete, and mixed-integer optimization problems with at least 11 input parameters, supporting both serial and parallel experimentation. Its ability to handle multi-objective optimizations focusing on cost and material efficiency with notable performance shows promise for AI-powered design for optimized and more sustainable processes.
Green Discovery Chemistry Award Winner
In 2025, the GCIPR Awards program expanded with the Green Discovery Chemistry Award. The Green Discovery Chemistry Award recognizes outstanding efforts in discovery chemistry that demonstrate compelling environmental, safety and/or efficiency improvements through green chemistry and engineering.
The Pfizer team has been awarded the inaugural prize for their submission, “Walk-Up Automated Reaction Profiling (WARP) System: A Tool for Reaction Monitoring Designed for Discovery Chemists.” The WARP system emphasizes waste reduction and minimizing exposure to hazardous substances. The technology provides a useful and versatile profiling tool for challenging reactions and is capable of improving reaction yields, shortening reaction times, and enhancing efficiency in various chemical processes while also reducing environmental impact. It features a simple user interface system to allow open-access use, offering a wide range of options for chemists and expanding the reach of the green chemistry technologies. The winning team consists of Muhammad Alimuddin, John Braganza, Paul Richardson, Wei Wang, and Alex Yanovsky, pictured below.
All award winners will present their innovations at the ACS GCI Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in Pittsburgh, PA this June, in the session "Advancing Sustainable Processes in Pharma and Allied Industries Utilizing Green Chemistry Innovations."