Environmental impacts with manufacturing Personalised Medicine

Environmental impacts with manufacturing Personalised Medicine

Personalised medicines aim to move therapies from medicines designed for use by all people, to medicines targeted to specific sub-populations based on their particular genomic characteristics, and ultimately to approaches whereby therapeutic interventions are tailored to the specific characteristics of one individual. This move has implications for medicines manufacturing processes, and these implications need to be considered in terms of their environmental costs. This is especially because manufacturing of personalised medicines will most likely occur in addition to traditional manufacturing rather than instead of it. We wrote a report and made a range of recommendations about how the adverse environmental costs of manufacturing personalised medicines should be considered. This is a summary of the findings.