Though all industries can harvest low-hanging fruit in terms of sustainability (environmental, economic, social) in various aspects like waste-reduction, material/water/energy-consumption etc., pharma-specific SWOT analysis reveal internal and external obstacles for significant improvement: e.g. regulatory aspects, data handling, implementation of innovation.

Conservative and risk-avoiding internal/external regulatory bodies with different views and foci result in a downward spiral narrowing down the operational window, fostering only applying legacy approaches and create a hindering environment for implementing innovative technologies.

On the other hand, regulatory bodies are right asking for thorough understanding of products and processes (e.g. ICH Q8-10) which comprises the ability to rationally explain formulation and process.

Data, information, knowledge play a major role in creating that knowledge and wisdom around products, the human body and our industry in the widest sense. With vast amount of (unstructured) data available, supercomputing power, NN, AI, KBS are necessary prerequisites for harvesting knowledge. Plus, educating next generation scientists in best practices of (DOE-)data-evaluation, modelling, simulation becomes even more important to achieve next big steps in sustainability.