Product stewardship

We conduct environmental risk assessments for all our new products in accordance with applicable regulations. Beyond the regulatory requirements, as a stewardship initiative we have also reviewed the environmental risk assessments for many of our existing products and, where appropriate, have undertaken additional voluntary testing to refine the assessments.

In addition to conducting environmental risk assessments, AstraZeneca has launched an internal procedure to produce Environmental Risk Management plans that will accompany all new medicines during their lifecycle. These Plans will enable all available environmental data to be taken into account at key decision points, and provide early warning of medicines with indications of potential concern to the environment.

Products in our development pipeline are likely to result in lower environmental residues than those in our current portfolio for two primary reasons:  

Firstly, the needs of the patient and the environment may frequently coincide.  In general, improvements sought in drug design aimed at improved treatment and medicine effectiveness, will also reduce the amount of medicine excreted and, therefore, potentially present in environment.

For example: The current treatment regime for tuberculosis  requires the use of five different drugs over a period of 6-8 months.  This long, complex regime means that patients often give up taking the treatment once they feel better but before the disease is fully treated – which can lead to recurrence. One of the targets for our TB research team in Bangalore is to produce a single drug that is effective within four months. If successful, this could lead to a significant reduction in drug released to the environment during the treatment of this widespread disease.

Secondly, driven by patient need, an increasing proportion of our pipeline consists of biopharmaceuticals, which tend to be metabolised by the body or rapidly degraded in the environment. Nevertheless, we are investigating the feasibility of designing ‘greener’ medicines and are starting to engage external stakeholders on this issue.

Like other pharmaceutical companies, we manufacture our products in accordance with strict regulatory requirements.  Our processes are designed to avoid, or otherwise minimise the loss of product to the environment and ensure that any losses that do occur are unlikely to cause harm.

We currently have no scientific basis for believing our manufacturing discharges pose a significant threat to the environment, but continue to conduct internal evaluations to identify future research needs and to guide risk management decisions.

Our commitment extends to ensuring that we work only with suppliers who embrace standards of responsible business practice that are consistent with our own.