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Green & Sustainable Science

At the heart of our work to develop innovative, cutting-edge medicines, is our expertise and commitment to green and sustainable science. With patients as our focus, we strive to deliver dual value in a BMS therapeutic, a high-quality medication that will treat their disease while preserving our environment. We do this by ensuring that the methods we use to prepare our medications:

  • Protect the environment.
  • Protect the people who develop and manufacture the medicine.
  • Ensure affordability through design and delivery decisions.

As we continue our journey to integrate green and sustainability principles into our product life cycle, we use predictive analytics to inform design, guide innovation and drive a continuous improvement mindset during development. Our data-driven approach is enabled by rigorous tracking of key metrics and the communication of its impact. This “Green by Design” approach offers a strategic pathway to building a sustainable future, as shown in the broad overall reductions in waste (as measured by Process Mass Intensity, or PMI) achieved across the small molecule portfolio between 2016-2020.

Green By Design

38%

average PMI reduction across
9 projects between 2016-2020,
eliminating >1,000 MT waste.

Implementing Green and Sustainable Science Across our Internal Value Chain (2016-2020)

Infographic showing how Bristol Myers Squibb implements green and sustainable science across our internal value chain (2016-2020)

Green by Design

This greenness score provides a useful and quantitative method, complementary to mass-based metrics such as PMI and derived from the 12 principles of green chemistry and the 12 principles of green engineering. It also considers the inherent safety of a process, from both a worker exposure and process hazards perspective—making it easier to make complex decisions involving trade-offs between improved efficiency and enhanced process safety. While this tool is currently only useful in evaluating small molecules, we continue to analyze how we can expand this methodology to assess other important therapeutic modalities, including synthetic peptides, oligonucleotides, antibody–drug conjugates and biologics.

In addition to tracking waste reduction, we are committed to calculating “Greenness” scores for all clinical deliveries in our small molecule portfolio, conducting high-level Life Cycle Analyses (LCA) for small molecule drug substances entering the commercial space and visualizing our sustainability metrics using an integrated dashboard. Our suite of Green by Design tools is used to help guide decisions during development involving trade-offs between improved mass-based efficiency versus other environmental measures, such as solvent selection. The LCA tool, developed by the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute Pharma Roundtable, enables the assessment of additional sustainability metrics not tracked by our in-house scorecard. As demonstrated for deucravacitinib, a promising first-in-class treatment for psoriasis in Phase III clinical trials, the Green by Design approach led to tremendous sustainability improvements for people and the environment.

Applying Green by Design Approach

Impact of applying BMS’ Green by Design approach during the progression of deucravacitinib (TYK 2 inhibitor in Phase III) from its initial synthetic route to its commercial synthetic route:

  Change Annual Savings*
Cumulative PMI (kg/kg API) -74% 989K kg waste
Energy (MJ/kg API) -73% 66K MJ energy
GWP (kg CO2 equiv/kg API) -63% 2.8MM kg CO2e
Water depletion (kg/kg API) -78% 10.5MM kg water
Cost ($/kg API) -53% $18MM

* Based on estimated 800 kg API/year at peak volume

Bristol Myers Squibb’s Green
Chemistry Scorecard

  • Helps guide decisions made during API process development.
  • Provides a key methodology to assess the environmental and safety performance of our processes to manufacture compounds in development.
  • Provides a useful and quantitative method derived from the 12 principles of green chemistry.
  • Considers the inherent safety of a process, from both a worker exposure and process hazards perspective.

Believing that innovation and collaboration are at the core of our mission to create safe, economical and sustainable processes to supply high-quality active ingredients for the medicines we deliver to patients, we partner with external companies and academics to invent and develop new capabilities to both accelerate our development and improve our sustainability footprint. Most notably, we recently teamed up with the Scripps Research Institute to introduce disruptive innovation in the field of stereoselective thiophosphate synthesis, leading not only to remarkable sustainability improvements on the STING-Interferon program, but having broad implications in oligonucleotide drug discovery.

Moving forward, we are committed to continuing to focus on the above Green by Design concepts and technologies, as well as striving to:

  • Reduce our dependency on precious metals.
  • Increase our use of enzymes/biocatalysis.
  • Continue to expand our technology capabilities (such as continuous processing) to reduce our use and generation of hazardous substances.

Chemical Process Development Sustainability Dashboard

Greenness

Bar chart showing Bristol Myers Squibb's Chemical Process Sustainability in the greenness category

Waste

Bar chart showing Bristol Myers Squibb's Chemical Process Sustainability in the waste category
Table showing Bristol Myers Squibb's Greenness/Step and PMI/Step values for each yearly campaign in 2016, 2018 and 2021

Implementing Green and Sustainable Science Across our Internal Value Chain (2016-2020)

  1. Discovery
  2. Chemical Synthetics Development:
    1. Route Invention: Predict Sustainability of proposed route green by design
    2. Process Invention: Environmentally friendlly solvents/reagents
  3. Commercial:
    • Process Characterization: Less waste, increase in efficiency

Greenness

Step Greenness (%) Projects (#)
24% 2
27% 1
30% 1
33% 6
36% 7
38% 13
41% 9
44% 9
47% 14
50% 5
53% 13
56% 5
59% 4
62% 3
65% 1
68% 1
71% 2

Waste

Step Greenness (%) Projects (#)
15% 4
30% 19
45% 23
60% 13
75% 13
90% 9
105% 8
120% 4
225% 1
Program Name Campaign Purp. Year Greenness/Step PMI/Step (kg/kg)
Campaign Purp.: campaign - 1 Year: 2016 Greenness/Step: 42% 80%
Program Name: Program A Campaign Purp.: campaign - 2 Year: 2018 Greenness/Step: 53% PMI/Step (kg/kg): 58%
Campaign Purp.: campaign - 3 Year: 2021 Greenness/Step: 55% PMI/Step (kg/kg): 48%