Clinical supplies & logistics Waste not
o run a five-year, international clinical trial with around 10,000 participants, you’re looking at generating roughly 630t of greenhouse gases. That corresponds to 525 round- trip flights from London to New York, for just one passenger. At least, that’s what the Sustainable Trials Study Group estimated in 2007, from their analysis of the 1999–2004 multicentre CRASH trial. Their report is widely considered to be the first published carbon audit of a clinical trial. Since then, a modest number of papers on trial sustainability
T
want not
When you’re trying to prove the benefi ts of an exciting new investigational medicinal product, or even study the possibility to repurpose approved drugs for new treatments, it’s easy to get laser-focused on the data and not think so much about the potential for wastage. But what if trial organisers could implement design principles that help keep waste to a minimum from the offset, and in turn save on costs? Monica Karpinski fi nds out from Professor Shaun Treweek, chair of Health Services Research at the University of Aberdeen; Dr Cristina Richie, lecturer in philosophy and ethics of technology at Delft University of Technology and James Connelly, CEO of not-for-profi t organisation My Green Labs.
have been published, and some initiatives have been put in place. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) published a carbon reduction strategy in 2009, for example. But dealing with the steep environmental cost of trials is still very much a live issue. In 2021, the Sustainable Healthcare Coalition estimated that the 350,000 clinical trials then registered in the US would have a carbon footprint of 27.5 million tonnes – just under a third of all annual carbon emissions from Bangladesh – which has a population of over 163 million.
Clinical Trials Insight /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net Clinical Trials Insight /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net
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