Representatives of the ETERNAL project team are already mobilizing to reach out to the world beyond our consortium, getting out and about to introduce the project and to learn more from others. We are keen to engage with researchers, and others hard at work in industry, regulatory and healthcare settings to make the development, manufacture, supply, selection, use and disposal of pharmaceuticals more efficient, more effective, and less impactful on the living environment.

The project was represented throughout the full two and a half days of an action-packed and informative stakeholder symposium and workshop co-organized by the PREMIER and TransPharm projects in Nijmegen, Netherlands from 4th to 6th April. This event brought together researchers and experts from the host projects and stakeholders from across the pharmaceuticals life cycle to share first findings and emerging concepts and proposals around how methodologies for environmental ecotoxicity and life cycle assessments can best be adapted to the needs of the complex and interdependent socio-techno-economic system that pharmaceuticals manufacture supply and use comprises. The workshop sessions especially provided a rare opportunity for authentic perspectives from across this spectrum of socio-economic activity to be heard all in one place - from those in drug development, regulatory compliance, and manufacturing at the one end, through impact assessment modellers and drug procurement agencies, to healthcare practitioners and pharmacies at the other.

Whilst in Nijmegen, ETERNAL WP5 lead John Henderson from Britest, took part in an introductory joint project meet-up with our sister projects TransPharm, SusPharma, and IMPACTIVE. This was a valuable first stage in identifying practical ways the projects can cooperate and complement one another around (for example) sharing of data and insight from areas of mutual interest, and through synergies in outreach, engagement, and dissemination activities. We are looking forward hugely to capitalizing on these opportunities to do more together than we could do individually by the sum of our parts.

John Henderson also proudly flew the flag for ETERNAL at the Making Pharmaceuticals UK conference and exhibition in Coventry UK on 25^th April where his presentation introduced the project’s ambitions to establish safe and sustainable pharmaceutical lifecycles by design and our key enabling themes of Green Manufacture, Digital Transformation, Safe Use and Disposal and Social Awareness. He also outlined some aspects of a new whole system-based methodology being piloted by Britest for the first time in Pharma to help innovation teams negotiate the pathway towards taking emerging innovations to commercial scale.

If you are in any way interested in greening the pharmaceuticals value chain, we look forward to meeting you in the months ahead. We hope to have a strong presence at the CPHI Europe show and conference in Barcelona this October 24^th – 26^th and will be  looking to gather a range of stakeholder perspectives during this major gathering of the global community advancing human health. Join our mailing list (via the blue bar below) to make sure you don’t miss out on further details this summer.