By Christiana Briddell, Portfolio Manager, and Isamir Martinez, Sr. Portfolio Manager, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR) announces the 2023 winners of the Peter J. Dunn Award and the CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award.
By Christiana Briddell, Portfolio Manager, and Isamir Martinez, Sr. Portfolio Manager, ACS Green Chemistry Institute
The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR) announces the 2023 winners of the Peter J. Dunn Award and the CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award. These awards recognize green chemistry innovations within the pharmaceutical and allied industries and their global supply chains.
“Green chemistry practices address issues of environmental responsibility, waste, cost, and time of pharmaceutical manufacture,” says John Tucker of Neurocrine Biosciences and a colleague of the ACS GCIPR awards team. “Our aim is to highlight the best examples of this serving to change the way green chemistry is viewed, exemplified, measured, and acknowledged…for the greater future sustainability of science.”
Winners of both awards will present their innovations at the ACS GCI Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference in Long Beach, CA this June, in the session ‘Advancing Sustainable Processes in Pharma and Allied Industries Utilizing Green Chemistry Innovations’.
2023 Winners of the Peter. J. Dunn Award for Green Chemistry and Engineering Impact
The 2023 Peter Dunn Award is jointly awarded to:
Bristol-Myers Squibb was awarded for the “Sustainable Manufacturing of BMS-986278 Leveraging an ERED/KRED Biocatalytic Cascade.” The BMS team’s work demonstrated the use of an ERED/KRED biocatalytic cascade to enable the efficient installation of two stereocenters on a cyclohexyl ring as well as other improvements leading to a reduced number of isolations, elimination of the use of halogenated solvents, reduction of overall Process Mass Intensity (PMI) by 86% from first to second generation, and reduction of projected raw material costs by 82%. BMS team members included Michael Smith, Yichen Tan, Candice Joe, David George, Michael Dummeldinger, Harshkumar Patel, Richard Fox, Shane McKenna, and two Codexis colleagues, Zara Seibel, and Stephan Jenne.
The team from Merck won for “Greener Manufacturing of STING agonist (MK-1454) featuring a Kinase-cGAS enzymatic cascade.” Merck’s team demonstrated innovations in synthetic chemistry enabled by organo- and bio-catalysis where new bond-forming strategies provided a methodology to access cyclic dinucleotides, coupled with a novel enzymatic method to synthesize 1-thiotriphosphates and a novel extraction technique exploiting tertiary ammonium extractants developed to facilitate the direct isolation of MK-1454 in high yield and purity. This process resulted in a 90% reduction in the PMI overall (~9000 to 881) and 4-fold increase in yield compared to the pre-clinical studies route. Merck team members included John McIntosh, Chihui An, Jeffrey Moore, Matthew Winston, Jennifer Obligacion, Nastaran Salehi Marzijarani, Zhijian Liu, Feng Peng, David Lamberto, and Xiadong Bu.
2023 CMO Excellence in Green Chemistry Award
PharmaBlock Sciences from Nanjing, China received the CMO Award for their “Innovative Continuous Process for the Production of 3-Oxocyclobutane-1-Carboxylic Acid”, an intermediate used in several marketed drugs and drug candidates. The team developed a novel continuous process to replace the conventional batch production that included an acidic decarboxylation step (Scheme 1 & 2). PharmaBlock reports that the new method is 20 times more efficient: In 10 days, using this new process, PharmaBlock produced over 2 MT with a comparative savings of 68,000 kW energy and the elimination of 8 tons of hazardous waste. In addition, PharmaBlock reduced the exposure of their chemists to potential hazards by developing a remote monitoring system to control the reaction parameters.
Original Process
New Process
PharmaBlock is continuing to work on its innovative process, which is continuous through the decarboxylation, decolorization, extraction, separation, and concentration phase, to include the final steps of crystallization and filtration. Team members on this project included Feng Zhang, Guangchao Ma, Pengpeng Chen, Bing Zhou, Wei Li, Fuxuan Wang, Hao Tian, Li Zhang, and Yuanxian Wang.
