Overview

Environmental impacts of medicines arise throughout their lifecycle from drug development to production, consumption, and disposal. This talk will focus on selected current sustainability gaps related to drugs’ lifecycles and their prospectful solutions that have been developed and evaluated in the scope of the Finnish strategic research project, SUDDEN (2018-2023).

The SUDDEN project (www.sudden.fi/en/), short for Sustainable Drug Discovery and Development with End-of-Life Yield, is an example of a multidisciplinary research and interaction effort to seek for new solutions to better management of environmental hazards of medicines on both molecular and product levels, and to promote environmentally sound practices and policies that could support likewise the development of pharmaceuticals intrinsically less harmful for the environment, the rational use of modern medicine, and the sustainability of the health care sector on both national and international levels.

Speaker

Tiina Sikanen, Associate Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland

Tiina has a PhD and title of docent in pharmaceutical chemistry from University of Helsinki, Finland; a second MSc in chemical engineering from Aalto University, Finland; and postdoctoral experience from Technical University of Denmark and University of Toronto, Canada. She currently acts as an associate professor (pharmacometabolomics) and principal investigator at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki. Her research group’s work focuses on development of microfluidic bioanalytical platforms and in vitro models to examine pharmaceuticals metabolism and toxicity in human (drug discovery) and fish (environmental hazards).

Since 2015, Sikanen is the founding member of the Generation Green task force of the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, which aims at incorporating environmental aspects as parts of pharmacy curricula and doctoral training in pharmaceutical sciences. She is also the vice-head of a large national strategic research project SUDDEN - a multidisciplinary effort by six Finnish research institutes toward Sustainable Drug Discovery and Development with End-of-Life Yield, www.sudden.fi/en/.

The material presented in this webinar has not been peer-reviewed. Any opinions are the presenter's own and do not necessarily represent those of IChemE or the Pharma Special Interest Group. The information is given in good faith but without any liability on the part of IChemE.

Webinar archive

This webinar is free of charge and open to all to attend, but if you wish to access the slides and a recording to replay on demand then you will need to be a member of the Pharma Special Interest Group.