Panel discussion on CATALYSIS

INNOVATIVE, COLLABORATIVE, EFFICIENT, SUSTAINABLE: IS IT WHAT WE ARE IN THIS INDUSTRY FIELD?

My family and I just got COVID19 – like many of us lately I guess – and although recovering from the finally quite strong symptoms will surely take us all a few more days, I could only think how lucky my wife and I were to have been fully vaccinated and to have benefited too from this fantastic multidisciplinary collaboration of biologists, pharmacologists, pharmacists, chemists, engineers and many more specialists who invented, developed, tested, produced and delivered so quickly billions of safe vaccine doses. So safe doses that against mild to no side effects at the vaccination time, they could drastically reduce the risk of symptoms requiring a hospitalization.

Beside being fast, efficient and truly human focused in their vaccine developments, some of these specialists also managed to be truly sustainable, literally living many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) (1) and developing “manufacturing containers”, enabling manufacturing of mRNA based vaccines, and later on other medicaments, in countries where no competencies to do so were there before. Their first units will go later this year to a couple of African countries; and they additionally plan full training of the local crews who will operate these manufacturing containers. (2) They show this way a much higher efficiency towards UNSDG number 3, “good health and well-being for all”, than many politicians, populistically lobbying for the suspension of relevant patents, but not even caring about bringing the required technologies and competencies to countries not having access to them neither to vaccines (when not additionally preempting first productions and deliveries for their own countries…).
In the 2022 panel discussion on Catalysis, we also wanted to see how innovative, collaborative, efficient, sustainable the industry sees itself. And we looked into two directions: biocatalysis and chemocatalysis, from the point of view of the catalysts manufacturer as well as from the one of the catalysts user.
Don’t count on me to spoil the contributions of the panelists with an extensive summary: they are all definitely worth being read and I will only emphasize a few themes I enjoyed and a few others I would hope to see discussed in future.