Green Chemistry as a Driver for Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The application of green chemistry principles is foundational in the route section and route development for active pharmaceutical ingredients at Amgen. In this perspective we present several examples where the application of concepts like atom economy, solvent minimization, reagent optimization, synthetic convergence, reduced energy use, real-time analysis and strong safety focus have contributed to the development of processes that are significantly greener and more environmentally friendly that the corresponding starting points. The selected examples span different levels of molecular complexity, and many of the presented examples have been reduced to practice on significant scale.