With insights from Ryan Walker, Sustainability Program Leader at Cytiva, and Wenshu Xu, Drug Discovery Tools Team Lead at TTP, we review the progress made by the industry so far and some examples where innovative thinking has had an impact on operations. Topics include the challenge of tackling Scope 3 emissions, reducing the impact of single-use plastics, and how collaboration across the ecosystem is key to meeting ambitious sustainability targets.
Guests:
- Ryan Walker, Sustainability Program Leader, Cytiva
- Wenshu Xu, Drug Discovery Tools Team Lead, TTP
.avif)
Setting the scene: sustainability in biopharma
[00:00:05] Stuart Climate change and its impact on our society is never far from the headlines. Businesses across the globe are looking at their operations and are setting ambitious sustainability targets, and biopharmaceutical companies are no different. Though with the preponderance of single use plastics and the complexity of supply chains, the hurdles to progress are significant. In this episode, I explore these issues and discuss potential solutions with two experts. Firstly, I'm joined by Ryan Walker, sustainability program leader at Cytiva, a key supplier of equipment, consumables and reagents into the biopharmaceutical industry, to speak about its contribution to the sustainability agenda. Secondly, I speak with my colleague, Wenshu Xu, who leads the product innovation efforts in drug discovery and preclinical tools at TTP. And with Wenshu, we're able to dive deeper into the drug development process and how product design can impact sustainability there. First, I spoke to Ryan to get an overview of how the biopharmaceutical industry sees its response to the threats of climate change. How did you first get involved in sustainability? What was your kind of journey towards that?
Introducing Ryan Walker
[00:01:38] Ryan Walker So I've been with Cytiva for 17 years now and in a number of different roles. And there is a small group of volunteers across the globe that just were passionate about environmental sustainability and honestly, all aspects of sustainability. And when Cytiva became a company in 2020 and when it was purchased by Danaher, our CEO at the time said sustainability has to be one of the imperatives. It has to be one of the cornerstones of how we build a business. And so since 2020, Cytiva had sustainability as one of the top five imperatives every year. And so I had the great privilege back in 2020, I was doing something else, and I had the privilege of being the first full time hire to join and do sustainability. And subsequently it has grown tremendously. We now have a number of employees, not only within sustainability, a global group, but also what we believe, which is to start to entrench employees in sustainability and their functions in the business. Because our belief is you cannot you need to have a global central focus and strategy, but the real work happens within the functions, within the businesses. So I have the privilege of doing it back in 2020, and I'm here.
[00:02:58] Stuart Yeah. What sort of changes have you seen in the organization over that time?
Sustainability as a core business imperative
[00:03:03] Ryan Walker Significant. You know, I think when we were first getting started, we were trying to figure out where the right strategy should be, where we should focus. And so that led us to do a what we call a materiality assessment to understand what was important for the business, what was important for our stakeholders. But I think even back in 2020, to be honest with you, Stuart, our industry, I think, was still at the precipice of where it is now. I think there was a focus on it, but if you ask me in my almost five years now of doing this full time in sustainability, the growth, the trajectory, the ambition, the aggressiveness, the acceleration across our industry, it's something I have not seen in my 17 years in this industry. It is it has gone from zero to 60 in that amount of time.
[00:03:49] Stuart Do you think the Cytiva is is at the heart of that or who's who's driving it? If it's if it's not Cytiva, but who's driving it? If it's Cytiva, why are you in such a good position to do it?
Industry drivers and Cytiva’s role
[00:04:01] Ryan Walker It's a great question. So I'd say that our large biopharma accounts in this industry are largely driving the direction, right? So the largest customers and what we call license holders are the ones taking the therapies to be in patients. I'd say the largest ones are the ones probably driving the direction. I think Cytiva is absolutely in that camp, and I hope that's not arrogant to say that. I think that no doubt we have organizations we admire and aspire to accelerate towards that level. But we have a very clear ambition that we want to not just do this because it's compliance related or to check the box or it's regulatory. Those are all great reasons to do it, but we have ambitions to lead in this space, and that's where we're going to head.
[00:04:47] Stuart And what I suppose are the near term goals while near-term barriers that you're trying to overcome? And how does that help define what you do day to day?
Targets and the challenge of scope 3 emissions
[00:04:59] Ryan Walker So we have 2025 and 2030 targets and 2032 targets along with the majority of the industry. In fact, I'll share with you a quick. I'll probably reference this throughout our conversation here, but we conducted what we call the Global Biopharma Sustainability Review, and this was done in 2024. It was it was a research study conducted across 800 executives and leaders across the biopharma industry, across 18 countries. And what we learned from that Biopharma Sustainability Review was pretty telling. And one of the the stats or one of the research pieces we learned from that was that 62 percent of the biopharma companies we researched have made sustainability their number one priority in the next five years. That to me is powerful, right, because you're talking almost two thirds of our industry saying this is our top priority. So and I say that because you asked me about our targets. And when I'm talking to our group, I say the reason why is they're top one of the five, five years, because 2030 is a key milestone, as you know, within sustainability. It's when we're going to really start to understand whether or not we are achieving, exceeding or falling short of the Paris Climate agreement, 1.5°C pathway. So we expect to have our targets around carbon emissions energy, water, packaging, plastics, waste, societal impacts. But I'd say to answer your question in a different way, the area that I'd say is on the forefront of everyone's minds right now across our industry is scope 3 emissions. Those value chain emissions that are upstream and downstream of our own manufacturing sites and operations. That's what's on everyone's minds and what we're all trying to march towards in the next five, ten, fifteen years.
[00:06:46] Stuart I was impressed by the importance that biopharma is placing on sustainability and by the actions Cytiva is taking to support the industry in meeting its goals. Because of the way that greenhouse gas emissions are classified internationally, most of the focus to date has been internal. As companies have sought to reduce scope 1 emissions directly from company operations and scope 2 emissions related to the electricity purchased by the company. But if we're collectively going to reach the Paris 2015 targets, then as Ryan says, we're going to be looking a lot more as scope 3 emissions. And these are by far the most wide reaching and include the impact of all the materials and services that are purchased by a company. And it's these emissions that are going to take concerted effort across the ecosystem to address. And at the end of the day, this approach makes sense because this is a problem that ultimately affects everyone. I asked Ryan, how Cytiva was approaching working in partnership with its suppliers to reduce scope 3 emissions. You would say it's not necessarily your own operations, but it's the operations of your of your suppliers. Is that what you're trying to focus on?
Working with suppliers on emissions
[00:08:10] Ryan Walker So I'd say it's a both. I you know, I'll give it a hand, right? So we know that scope 1, scope 2 emissions. Those emissions within our direct control or the purchased emissions are purchased energy that we have our scope 1, scope 2 emissions. They make up about five percent of Cytiva's overall emissions. So to your point, 95 percent of Cytiva's emissions are value chain emissions, meaning they're upstream and downstream of our own operations. And to your question, approximately two thirds of our emissions come from our suppliers. So those purchase goods and services, the upstream distribution of getting the products, even the downstream emissions of us, how we ship those to our customers in the end, those are all coming from the supply chains in our in our suppliers. So, yes, the majority. We have to work with our suppliers. But what I love about sustainability story that I haven't seen, you know, in all of my different day to day of my 17 years in this industry is this to me brings our industry together. It's a unified approach because what I love about sustainability is we cannot as Cytiva be sustainable if our upstream suppliers are not doing their part, just like our downstream customers cannot be sustainable without Cytiva and their fellow suppliers. And so you can say all you want as a company that you want to be and you will be a sustainable company. There are things you can do, but you are so largely dependent on this collaboration.
[00:09:38] Stuart But you can't you can't do this in isolation.
[00:09:41] Ryan Walker It's physically impossible the way it's all tied together, which is cool, right? Because this brings us together for a very common cause, somewhat similar to, I'd say, when we went through Covid, right? And we were all working together across the entire industry to see how we could accelerate the vaccine to market, how we could work together across supply chain. To me, this is a similar kind of idea, but for the environment, for society.
[00:10:07] Stuart I also wanted to ask Ryan his thoughts on single use plastics. According to Cytiva's Biopharma Sustainability Review, 55 percent of respondents say that they reduce their consumption of single use plastic, while 50 percent have created more sustainable packaging. Clearly this is something on the minds of many in the industry. So I want to ask Ryan more about it. What about in advanced therapies and cell culture and biopharma where there's a lot of single use plastic? Is there anything going on up in that area?
Single use plastics: challenges and innovations
[00:10:45] Ryan Walker Yeah, there's a lot going on in this space. And let me start by saying the great things about plastic. Before we talk about how we also resolve for the challenges of plastic. We know from two life cycle assessments that single use plastic is more environmentally friendly than its predecessor, stainless steel. So and at first I kind of doesn't make sense. But when you think about the amount of chemicals, the amount of water or the amount of energy to run large stainless vessels. And that's not to detract from the fact, though, that we as an industry have to look at how we manage end of life of these plastics or the beginning of life. So I would say a lot of progress is being made in this space. But I will also say it's one of the most challenging aspects of sustainability within our industry. I'd say scope 3 emissions and single use plastics, because you know this well, right, and anyone listening to this probably will as well. The nature of our plastics, right, the mixed plastics, the different types of plastics. We're not using one type of plastics like you see in a Coca-Cola bottle. Secondly, of course, the things that go through, right, to make the therapies, the now sudden you've got biological contamination. So not a typical recycling organization is going to necessarily take back that plastic, add to that the mixed plastics, diffuse plastics, etc.. So we look at it from two angles. One, the end of life. What can we do about the end of life of single use plastics? And I'll give you one example. We we manufacture what we call syringe sculptors, right? And and the syringe filters will filter out any impurities for us to be able to the customer to be able to do the work they need to do. These have never been able to be recycled before. But you were talking about partnerships or through a partnership with TerraCycle, a global organization focused on recycling the impossible as their motto. We were able to help our industry understand how we could recycle syringe filters. And to date, we've we've recycled over 650,000 syringe filters. A drop in the bucket, but still progress on how we can work on end of life.
[00:12:52] Stuart And it's a proof of concept, isn't it?
[00:12:53] Ryan Walker It's a proof of concept that we can do this right once again as an industry. We can we can we can challenge the assumption that it can't be recycled. Well, no, it can be. It just takes resources and a bit of bandwidth and doing that. I think the larger opportunity, though, in in my mind, in our industry is on that eco design element. Can we challenge the assumption that the plastics we've used and the plastics that our customers have validated? Can we challenge the assumption that those cannot be manufactured differently, or can we can use alternatives or substitutes for that? So right now we are in the pilot phase of some bio-based plastics that we already have worked with some customers and say, yep, they'll validate it. We don't think it will take a complete revalidation because they're like for like materials. But we can start to substitute and implement bio-based plastics as opposed to the virgin fossil fuel based plastics in the near future. I think that's going to come, Stuart, in the next couple of years here within our industry.
[00:13:51] Stuart I can see both of those approaches, are both of those innovations being really, really welcomed by people in the industry especially, yes, if you've if you've managed to get to a place where the validation burden is low and with the recycling, you're on top of that, your your are doing well. Actually, you don't really need to change some of your critical components. You may be able to to stay with what you're doing and do some recycling as well. So those are some great.
[00:14:18] Ryan Walker I'd love to hear the thoughts from our listeners if if if they want to chime in, in the chat, etc.. But to me, we can't lose sight of the fact that single use plastics help us all do our mission in this industry and it's it's it's just advance accelerate therapeutics. So single use plastics will help us advance the therapies that are brought to market in a quicker and a faster and a safer, more effective way. And so we've got to balance that what we're doing for society. And that's always been the focus and the mission of our industry with that end of life and how do we make sure we're being responsible, but also helping bring therapies to life as quickly as possible. That's got to be the balance.
[00:14:57] Stuart And that's the dual mission of of the pharmaceutical industry to improve the human condition. Right. And we're not going to do very much for humans if we if we can keep on polluting the planet. So, there's a sort of there is there is a balance and there's a there's a sort of synergy there. Do you do you see that your sustainability priorities are aligned with the priorities of pharma companies? Because there's obviously going to be some deviation there. But where do you where do you see best traction?
Aligning sustainability with pharma priorities
[00:15:31] Ryan Walker Yeah, I would say that by and large, yes. And I think once again that in my four and a half years of doing this, you've seen a marketing increase and improvement of the industry coalescing around. Targets initiatives. And I think science based targets has been the greatest influencer of that. Right. So our customers have now increasingly committed to and received approval from science-based targets just this year, earlier this year, Danaher, our parent companies so therefor Cytiva have committed to science based targets to include long term Net Zero. And we're actually working on it as we speak, Stuart, to roll out those expectations of our upstream suppliers next year. So I think you are largely seeing this this coalescence of the industry around the key targets, the key milestones that matter. No doubt there are still areas where we're challenged, right? Going back scope 3 emissions is one of those areas. And I'll say another area that is is extremely difficult within the industry and probably across all industries right now is around data. And so I want to give you a quick stat here that I think is this goes back to the Biopharma Sustainability Review, but 68 percent of those 800 executives and leaders across biopharma industry, 68 percent do not have the data they need to be able to make meaningful decisions as to how they're going to reduce their emissions, 68 percent. And in fact, only 17, only 17 percent can accurately measure their scope 3 emissions. So we've got a challenge across our industry, the data in scope 3, especially because it's all value chain driven, because it's driven by our suppliers you may not have been working with on data before or downstream with our customers. That data is extremely difficult. And there's all kinds of discussions around the level of transparency of that data. How do we transmit that data to make sure that it's used for the right reasons? How do we capture and collect that data? So so in a while, say to a long answer to your question of do do you see the industry coalescing around similar targets and ambitions and trajectory? Yes. Do we have a challenge that I will say is absolutely probably the largest we have, which is tied into scope 3, which is data. That's going to be the area that we still have to align on as an industry.
[00:17:51] Stuart It's reassuring to see Cytiva's customers, being prepared to embrace change and how understanding the constraints of their customers allows Cytiva to develop better, more environmentally friendly products. In the sustainability conversation is also important to discuss adaptability and ask Ryan for his take on this. The adoption piece then is there as well. Right. It's for so many factors to to adoption. Is it available? Does it have sufficient supply? What's the cost? What's the environmental impact? I suppose a cost is probably one of those as well, which is quite higher, but you've got to get the buy in and and the rationale right as well.
The adoption challenge: cost and availability
[00:18:37] Ryan Walker You absolutely do. But I go back to your point on the cost aspect, and let me not let me not be trivial about this and let me not diminish that. Of course, there are significant amounts of examples where environmental sustainability cost more, so let me not portray anything to the contrary. But. I think that once again, we often times in sustainability and across our industry and across all industries automatically assume that, well, if we design a product differently, it's going to cost more. It's going to be, you know, the materials are going to be no more novel. Therefore, we it's going to cost. And I would say, by and large, what we see at Cytiva is, is that going back to that quote, which is what's good for the plan, it's good for business. And so it is so much about reducing waste. So can we as we design the product differently, can we relook at the types of plastics we're using to maybe reduce that? Can we look at the packaging we're using and maybe reduce the void feel. How many of us and this is another question for your audience. I'm at Amazon. I love purchasing things for my personal life off Amazon for the convenience. But even Amazon, as good as they are and supply chain logistics, there is never a scenario where I get a box where there is not a significant amount of void fill, right? So even they're trying to figure out how they reduce the amount of packaging and body feel, which then of course translates to if I've got a bigger box, even if it's a small little item, that means more CO2 and how I ship it. So, so, so much of ecodesign is about reducing. And I think that doesn't always necessarily have to translate to higher costs. So that would be my premise for the audience on that one, Stuart.
[00:20:09] Stuart How optimistic are you that we will hit our 1.5 degree target? Well, what's your take on that as a as a society?
Hitting the 1.5 degree target
[00:20:17] Ryan Walker I don't think we have any other choice. And I know that that sounds a bit cliche. I really don't. I I think if you look at the biopharma industry as an example. No doubt there are plenty of organizations across biopharma that were started in 2008, 9, 10. But in my four and a half years, the acceleration you've seen across our industry to me demonstrates we are serious about this as an industry. And the amount of collaboration that I see on a daily, weekly, monthly basis between suppliers and license holders is there. I think and believe that that's going on across other industries. Do not let me mislead the audience in saying that I think this is easy, that it's going to be a slam dunk, that we can just coast. If you if if you if you read or hear the news, we are not in the right trajectory we need to be in society. But I'm convinced that we have no other option. And I think we see the impacts of climate right now. And if we don't take this seriously, what can and will happen? And so I think is that becomes more and more apparent. We will accelerate this as a society, as a global society, and I'm convinced we'll hit it.
[00:21:31] Stuart I was inspired by Ryan's confidence in the ability of the biopharma industry and the ecosystem to pull together and drive change in order to meet global sustainability targets. My three key takeaways from my conversation with Ryan were, number one, sustainability is a priority for a majority of biopharma companies. Most have taken steps to reduce their scope 1 and scope 2 emissions and are now looking to scope 3 emissions to make greater progress. Number two, meaningful change is only going to be possible in partnership across the ecosystem because supply chains often comprise several different companies. With a common purpose though, and visibility of the impact, solutions can be found that are good for business and the environment. Number three, knowing your customer and the constraints they're acting under can lead to better product design, such as sourcing more eco friendly plastic with a low validation burden, as in Ryan's example. So picking on that last point, one area where plastic use has become almost ubiquitous is in drug discovery. Most who've worked in the industry will be familiar with the micro tie to plate, which enables high throughput drug screening on automated lab equipment to be performed at an industrial scale. So I wanted to find out how big pharma is tackling plastic use in their operations. And what innovative solutions might be considered. So I turned to my colleague, Wenshu Xu, who had product development activities in this area at TTP to find out more. First, I asked her how she'd seen the importance of sustainability growing throughout her career.
Introducing Wenshu Xu
[00:23:18] Wenshu Xu So originally from more of an academic background, it doesn't really impact me too much at the time, because it's all about doing the research in the lab at a quite small scale. And going to pharma, I think that's where I got the first impression in sustainability, where it's a big mission statement. But it was a little bit unclear to me how it really is translated to day to day life. But when I joined TTP and again get in touch with quite a variety of pharma and biotech companies, that's when I realized there's such a huge drive in innovating and developing technologies that could actually help to address the issues. What I realized is that the discovery and development process is actually a very wasteful process for the pharma industry. The amount of energy, plastic and reagents that are going to developing and manufacturing a drug is extremely large. That probably goes the same for clinical trials, such as a patient traveling from a location to the clinics, as well as using the products for the clinical trial, cold chain transportation. So when you have to you know, Covid vaccine is a great example of that, as well as the facilities, energy consumption. Combined, I read a report, it is estimated that this could take up to 50 percent of the CO2 emission in the supply chain steps. So in my at TTP, we are definitely seeing that demand because to be able to reduce the carbon footprint, it's not actually just about switching off the lights or flying less. Of course, those contribute to your sort of daily behavior change, but also fundamentally what you can do in R&D environment that would help to eliminate and reduce the amount of usage and essentially reducing the waste.
[00:25:13] Stuart Okay, so what sort of things are pharma companies actually doing in order to in order to reduce plastic waste? In your experience, I mean, yeah, we've talked about eliminating and reducing. What what about recycling? I mean, is that part of the part of the solution as well?
[00:25:31] Wenshu Xu So I view the sustainability more in the combined package. When you try to recycle, of course that's a way to re reduce the amount of plastic. But however the energy that goes into the recycling of that astro also has to be taken into account. So what I find is, you know, when looking at across the pharma industry, sustainability mission is built within their strategies like Roche, Acert and AbbVie.
[00:26:04] Stuart AstraZeneca in particular is an interesting case because they recently moved into their new campus in Cambridge, UK. I asked when you more about their ambitions.
Pharma’s ambition for net zero
[00:26:18] Wenshu Xu They're also the leading company, pharma company, who is driving the initiative in achieving sustainable sustainability goal. So what we're seeing is that they have the ambition to reach the Net Zero in carbon footprint by 2025, which essentially just next year. And also carbon negative by 2030. So from the facility's energy consumption, when I went to a tour, I was introduced to their building is using the geothermal heating. So you don't see a single air conditioning around the lab or the office building. So that's definitely from the more corporate and architecture thinking. And on the scientific, like, well, we are seeing them taking a lead in reduced nickel, a quantity of the materials and plastic waste.
[00:27:07] Stuart I was struck again by the wide ranging and holistic approach necessary to properly impact the carbon footprint of an entire organization and how behavioral change is such an important part of this. In this regard, I wondered what changes people in high throughput screening were expecting. And I asked Wenshu on her opinion. So if you just go back to the point about reducing format assay formats or thinking about kind of solvent use, do you know how much plastic you could, I suppose, theoretically reduce or eliminate by just thinking about doing things in a different way?
Miniaturisation and reducing plastic waste
[00:27:46] Wenshu Xu Yes, definitely. So one thing we're seeing is the promotion of miniaturization in the high throughput screening. Typically, if a company is carrying out a compund screening campaign, it could involve almost like two million compounds and the whole screening assay development. If you're using a high density well place such as a 1536, which is already at its limit because most companies might be looking 384-well plate and that essentially is equivalent to 12 liters of reagent. And that will be generating about 50 kilogram of plastic wastage such as pipette tips, microplates and reagent vessels. So what we're currently thinking is can we do something beyond just a microplate level? Can we do something in the printing space where droplets in the nanoliter or picoliter range can be printed down to carry out chemistry or biology assay? Or can we use microfluidic approaches where you're generating a lot more data points at a much higher frequency? So what we're seeing is that if you try to do things in microfluidic scale, you're reducing the volume by at least a factor of a thousand. And that would also cut down the waste by at least 95 percent. So this is especially beneficial in the sustainability goal, but also very valuable when it comes to precious patients on post where you don't really have a lot to waste.
[00:29:18] Stuart And I suppose that's very attractive for pharma companies who are trying to approach Net Zero as a as a tangible action they could take.
Hardware innovations for sustainability
[00:29:27] Wenshu Xu Yeah. So if we take AstraZeneca as example, again, it has also developed a fully acoustic compound management system. So this is for noncontact compound dispensing. So you could imagine rather than using pipette tips for every single compound, which you're not going to really click them because you're worried about cross-contamination in a campaign. This is definitely a great driver in reducing that plastic wastage. So, yes, like I said, again, going to the manufacturing scale is very key to reduce the waste. Once the API is developed into the medicine rather than looking at a single step, they are more looking at the total materials and time that can be reduced in optimizing the procedure.
[00:30:17] Stuart As we heard from Wenshu, pharma companies are looking to hardware innovation to support them in their mission to reduce plastic waste, I wondered what activities Wenshu had been a part of in developing these innovations. So in your personal career and your personal experience, have you worked on any projects where there's been a particularly strong sustainability angle, where you've been able to develop something that that move the needle?
Projects with sustainability impact
[00:30:46] Wenshu Xu Yes, definitely so. Couple of years ago, I led a fairly large program with a company called Nanna Therapeutics. So they're a campus based microfluidic company who was acquired by Astellas. So quite a bit of Japanese pharma. So at the time they've developed a very unique platform in doing screening by DNA-encoded library, where they're using microfluidics to encapsulate a single bead with cells. So when the time comes, the bead would release its compound to the cells, and essentially you'll be able to find effects on the cells by using fluorescent imaging.
[00:31:28] Stuart So this is a cell, a cell based readout for a compound activity. And you can use it in screening. Is that right.
[00:31:35] Wenshu Xu Exactly. Yes. And the power of that is by using microfluidics, you're generating thousands and thousands of droplets per second. And this way, you don't even need to find out where your compound goes. So it bypasses the power management because your DNA bead essentially tells you afterwards what compound has been effective. So it was quite a clever way of not having to track the compounds, but also you're able to find out, in effect, using image cytometry or other imaging methods.
[00:32:09] Stuart And what will what will be we being asked to do at TTP?
[00:32:12] Wenshu Xu Okay. So in parallel, in addition to the microfluidic approach, we were trying to help them in thinking and in other ways in dispensing not only to droplet volume. In fact, TTP has a long history in droplet printing. And the short drop was one of our IP using piezoelectric droplet dispensing methods in gentle cell printing. In that way we're able to achieve very high data density because we significantly reduce the pitch that is going beyond a 384 or 1536 microplate. So by printing the droplets really close to each other, roughly at a 450 micrometer, we were able to cramp it in 80,000 droplets in a small microscope sliced slide.
[00:32:59] Stuart So that's a massive increase in density.
[00:33:02] Wenshu Xu Exactly. I would say, you know, it's more than 25 percent, 25 times of the increasing density compared to a normal well plate. So you could see the save in plastic wastage as well as reagents is quite significant.
[00:33:18] Stuart And I remember that project very, very cool. Just thinking about how this would transform, how people operate, that their assays. I suppose one of the things that I want to know is why, why was this not done before? How did we end up in this situation where we were using kilos of plastic and liters of reagents to do drug screening in the pharma industry?
Challenges in adopting new technologies
[00:33:45] Wenshu Xu Of course, there are lots of technology limitations that cannot be realized, either history or in the past. Traditionally, of course, using plate is the most straightforward. The SBS format really standardized the well plate format so that if you buy any plate that can work with any instrumentation. So that level of standardization has being across the industry, which is, you know, really easy to use. So for pharma to really change that format from something that works really well with their instrument and their whole work process, that's going to be such a big drive to to turn that into something completely different. So what I'm saying, why so slow to happen in pharma for them to adopt new technology such as microfluidics or droplet dispensing is due to the intrinsic workflow that cannot be stopped because the pharma drug screening has to go on.
[00:34:43] Stuart There's a bit of there's a bit of inertia and sort of knowing when is the right time to adopt new technologies.
[00:34:51] Wenshu Xu Exactly. And I believe on the technology level, there are also many unaddressed challenges to perform biology or chemistry in such a small scale. So, of course, when you perform your microliter reaction or bioassay in the microplate evaporation or diffusion, those are less of a problem because you are probably performing your assay over a couple of hours, sometimes over days, but your cells will stay quite happily in such volume or in a humidity food. So that is more on the micro scale where things are much more understood. But when you move into the micro scale, especially in an analytic range, suddenly all the laws of physics happening in such small scale would become much more complicated. So definitely evaporation is a key issue. And secondly, on the biological side, how would the cells survive without the friends of others? Because in a cell culture media, they often produce, you know, friendly biologics to keep each other alive. But in such a microfluidic environment, they don't have many of their friends and also how much nutrients are still available for them to grow. So in fact, it comes to the fundamental science that one has to understand very thoroughly to be able to come up with solution that will still support the cell growth or to find a ways to prevent or minimize the evaporation during the time when the assay or the reaction is being carried out.
[00:36:25] Stuart That's really interesting. You've sort of tried to solve one problem and in the course of the development, you generate and uncover other other problems, and I suppose that was part of the interest of this project was to to come up with solutions that would still allow you to achieve that goal. But while minimizing any of those kind of emergent effects that they came along to try and derail us.
[00:36:48] Wenshu Xu Exactly. Yeah. Because, you know, when when we first approach it, it's more of an engineering problem. How can we prevent certain things from happening?
[00:36:58] Stuart So I was just thinking about the example of the cell based assays project that you mentioned, and the one of the other benefits of going for further militarization was actually the ability to use a lot fewer number of cells. Now it's okay if you use a lot of cells, if you've just got a standard cell line, but what if you want to move towards personalized medicine, you might actually only be using a patient sample, which you might have very, very limited quantities of. And so you you really wouldn't be able to do the sort of standard screening assay when you had that sort of material anyway. So often the innovations that kind of have a sustainability angle also unlock other opportunities as well.
Linking sustainability with personalised medicine
[00:37:42] Wenshu Xu Yeah, exactly. So this is really a very good combined effort because we're not just purely targeting sustainability by overlooking other issues that might exist in the system, but actually combining with that, we will come up with really quite innovative ideas.
Final reflections: partnerships and innovation
[00:38:02] Stuart I really enjoy talking to Wenshu about her experiences working on projects that have a direct impact on the industry sustainability goals, and here are my key takeaways from our conversation. Number one, behavioral change is necessary for sustainability initiatives to succeed in large organizations, and companies need to find ways to align their sustainability goals with their employees personal motivations. Number two, new technology can be instrumental in facilitating behavioral change as it allows people to work in ways that were not possible before. And number three, what's good for the environment can be good for business, too. And we should look for ways in which innovations can deliver value add in other areas by improving assay quality, for example. Over the past five years, we've made great strides towards sustainability targets, but there's still a long way to go. While we can celebrate the progress the industry has made in reducing waste and transitioning to cleaner energy, significant obstacles remain, such as tracking scope 3 emissions and moving away from single use plastics. Which brings us back to our central question. Given the hurdles to overcome in the biopharma industry, how do companies go about achieving their ambitious sustainability targets? Well, if the efforts of Ryan and Wenshu are anything to go by is by forming the right partnerships with suppliers and innovators alike. It's about understanding how to incentivize environmentally sustainable behavior and making any changes good for business and using technology to reduce barriers. So I'd like to thank my two guests today, Ryan and Wenshu, for discussing this topic of societal importance with me. And thank you for listening.
