PHARMECO's overall objective is to provide the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry with a comprehensive decision support system for designing, operating, and evaluating the sustainability of healthcare product manufacturing. This encompasses early design phase, operation, and eventual use and disposal. The project's first objective is to enhance the early-stage development of pharmaceutical products by implementing Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD)-driven process-intensified platforms (e.g. continuous manufacturing). This involves designing sustainable processes based on SELECT criteria and setting up eco-friendly systems for producing small molecules, peptides, oligo-nucleotides, proteins and RNA with advanced control measures. Next, PHARMECO aims to scale up and demonstrate environmentally-friendly processes for industrial manufacturing and decontamination, which includes creating infrastructure for studying key unit operations with sustainable technology and for SSbD driven process intensified manufacture at a scale sufficient for clinical testing and a manufacturing process that is easily transferred to a GMP environment. PHARMECO also aims to steer the development of (bio)manufacturing processes towards sustainable production through digital decision-making tools. This involves creating a modular digital tool for assessing sustainability from multiple perspectives, evaluating practices. Finally, the project seeks to establish a standardized approach for assessing the environmental sustainability of pharmaceuticals, which involves collaboration with various stakeholders to create scientifically robust guidelines, applying consistent Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies, and facilitate regulatory adoption of standardized LCA practices. By integrating sustainability considerations into every phase of manufacturing PHARMECO will positively revolutionize pharmaceutical industry.

The PHARMECO project has revolutionized pharmaceutical manufacturing towards sustainability by integrating environmentally friendly technologies and harmonized sustainability assessment methods into healthcare industry practices. It has successfully implemented a synergistic workflow from modeling to industrial scale, established a holistic end-to-end sustainability performance assessment including health gains, and introduced a prospective evaluation framework ensuring the scalability and GMP eligibility of the developed technologies and processes. The project’s interdisciplinary and complementary consortium has enabled the comprehensive achievement of its sustainability and innovation goals across the entire pharmaceutical value chain.