Furthermore, it offers a broad range of sustainable, innovative platforms and capabilities for pre-clinical and pilot programs to commercial quantities, including Corynex protein expression technology, oligonucleotide synthesis, antibody drug conjugations (ADC), high potency APIs (HPAPI), biocatalysis, continuous flow manufacturing and more.
The company believes in its mission, which is to improve the overall health of humankind, and that this includes protecting the important and fragile ecosystems in which we live. By embracing greener, safer and more efficient manufacturing operations, Aji Bio-Pharma provides safe, compliant and more sustainable and innovative solutions from early development onwards.
If we look around us, we see that the world is changing: more and longer periods of extreme temperatures, heavy rainfall and flooding are common occurrences. Our impact as humans is becoming increasingly visible, and climate change can’t be ignored anymore.
“Independent to the kind of industry you are working in, we collectively need to act before it’s too late,” explains Wouter Biesemans, vice president of compliance at Ajinomoto Bio-Pharma Services. “Aji Bio-Pharma is setting out the pathway to secure a sustainable future for our company. We guarantee the health and safety of our employees and consider the impact of the manufacturing of our products to the natural environment.”
Trends Driving Sustainability in Pharma
According to Biesemans, there are three big drivers of sustainability: evolving legislation, increasing costs for non-adapters and social responsibility.
“Legislation is quite obvious: the 2015 Paris climate act, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the European Green Deal and so many other local and ISO regulations have us shifting gears towards sustainable goals. We are proud that all our sites are ISO14001 certified, and that our Indian site is ISO50001 (energy management) certified,” he says.
“Emission rights and usage of natural resources, elements that a few years ago were almost a marginal expense have become increasingly expensive and will continue to become more expensive. Companies that do not entirely change their consumption behavior will be penalized heavily.”
“Finally, let us not forget the other drivers for a sustainable future—our most precious asset—our employees: their safety, their well-being and their increasing expectations towards us. Younger people aren’t only satisfied with the pay check they get at the end of the month, the company they work should symbolize their own values and beliefs, and hence social responsibility towards our employees and our environment is an equal game changer when it comes to sustainable efforts,” he adds.
Ajinomoto Shared Values
Ajinomoto Shared Values (ASV), is the Ajinomoto Group’s credo symbolizing sustainability. A core value that resonates within every business of the Ajinomoto Group, and a value that saw daylight before the United Nations (UN) introduced their Sustainable Development Goals.
“Whether we speak about food seasonings, consumer food products, amino acids or pharmaceuticals, each business subscribes to this moto: innovate and develop with the consumer or customer and their environment first in mind. When this is successful it results in the well-being of the customer, and it solves social issues, which creates the necessary profit that at their end can be re-invested, like a virtuous circle,” remarks Biesemans.
Within Aji Bio-Pharma, the company adopts ASV in all of its business activities and further applies it to make it state-of-art towards its CDMO business. This led to the creation of what Aji Bio-Pharma calls the Sustainable Entrepreneurship program, a tailored program identifying its vision on making sustainable products and future-proof business activities.
The Sustainable Entrepreneurship program consists of seven pillars: environmental care, health and well-being, safety, healthy financials, operational excellence, partnership and quality awareness.
Next to these seven pillars the company recognizes two enablers overarching these pillars: Aji Bio-Pharma’s Cultural Values and innovation. “At Aji Bio-Pharma, we strongly advocate the how, the how we achieve results is as important as the result itself,” says Biesemans.
Importance of Innovation
“In order to be ready for the future we’ll need to innovate: whether you’re an HR recruitment manager, an electricity maintenance officer or an operations shift supervisor, the way we’re running today’s processes will evolve, and this should be sooner rather than later,” Biesemans argues. “At Aji Bio-Pharma, we subscribe to the industry 4.0 principles and we believe that each department and cross-functional team should be the ambassador of new technologies and out-of-the-box thinking when identifying business solutions.”
Aji Bio-Pharma is a big promoter of new process technologies. Biesemans explains this in more detail by splitting the group’s offered portfolio into two groups:
- The new, development stage products
- The matured, commercialized products
“The application of new process technologies in new development products is very evident. At Aji Bio-Pharma, we strive to make sure these manufacturing processes show benefits towards energy consumption, result in less waste streams and increase the process and thus operator safety. The AJIPHASE technology developed in the R&D group in Japan for oligonucleotides and the continuous flow manufacturing unit we designed internally, are only two current examples.
“The continuous flow manufacturing unit is a great example of what pharmaceutical manufacturing will look like in the future and it clearly shows benefits in smaller amounts of solvent, a safer working environment, reduced waste and a much lower energy consumption profile. This also has financial benefits.
“For established commercialized products, introducing new innovative processes can face additional hurdles, especially when you operate in a pharmaceutical environment, and where the boundaries are mostly fixed by the product’s registration file. Despite this framework, we think positive and together with our customers we keep exploring technologies that benefit the ecological, safety and economical footprint of their products. At this moment, several partnered initiatives are on-going towards the recovery of solvents, precious metals and the removal of APIs out of waste streams.”
Impact of COVID-19
One might think that the COVID-19 pandemic took sustainability out of the spotlight, but in reality, the pandemic emphasized the importance of acting in a sustainable manner and thinking of the longer term.
More than ever, Aji Bio-Pharma’s customers, local authorities and end patients were counting on the company, and it wanted to be sure that its necessary life-saving medicines could be available. In response, it took a positive and determined stance that it would anticipate and mitigate the unprecedented event.
“Within Aji Bio-Pharma we could see clearly see that the pandemic had the potential to adversely impact operations, and being a global player, we could be impacted in different regions and at different points in time,” comments Biesemans. “While the commercial supply chains that we support were largely unaffected we have seen an impact on the clinical development pipelines. A number of these have been adversely impacted from reduced patient enrollment in clinical trials. Although this is not something in our control, we have been striving to remain agile to accommodate our customer’s changing needs and to mitigate the impact.
“Looking at where we are today, we are doing good, and even better than we could have expected initially and this mainly following the seeds we put in the ground months and years before,” Biesemans says.
Anticipating the Future
As with all challenging events there is always a positive takeaway.
“I am convinced that sustainability very soon will become more predominant in our lives than ever before. We all recognized during this pandemic that we need to care for what we love. The pandemic emphasized the importance of being proactive to deal with these things while we can still control them,” concludes Biesemans.
Aji Bio-Pharma believes that the overall industry has strong potential to improve the processes by which drugs are manufactured and through this to reduce energy consumption and waste. According to Biesemans, the pendulum is changing and increasingly there is a high focus and willingness to embrace greener, safer and more efficient manufacturing operations.