Pfizer’s green chemistry team turns 25

It has been a quarter of a century since the biopharmaceutical giant Pfizer launched its green chemistry team. In that time, the group has helped redesign the manufacturing process of Viagra to make it more sustainable, and played a key role in improving the environmental profile of the antiviral Paxlovid, which the company developed during the Covid-19 pandemic. What began as a modest initiative at Pfizer’s Connecticut R&D facility to optimise individual drug manufacturing routes has since become embedded across the company, extending into areas such as discovery, safety and commercial manufacturing.

With about 15 members spanning subfields of chemistry and beyond, the Pfizer green chemistry team implements the goals of the company’s broader green chemistry programme.

‘The team began as a group of chemists, engineers and [individuals] other scientific disciplines who started collecting information about our production processes that would help serve as metrics to better understand how green or not they were and help address gaps there,’ recalls Juan Colberg, who has been at Pfizer almost 34 years and currently serves as the company’s green chemistry programme leader.