To quote Otto von Bismarck, "Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others". Sayle's corollary: "Wise men learn from fatal mistakes".<br/><br/>In the pharmaceutical industry, sharing chemical safety polices and adopting those of other companies is considered best practice. Recently, for example, the Pistoia Alliance has begun a Chemical Safety Library (CSL) project to formalize and share such information. Here we describe the efforts of one pharmaceutical company to implement Merck's Reaction Review Policy [1] via automatic alerting within their Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs). Technical challenges such as capturing the scale of a reaction (volume of reaction vessel) and the concentrations of highly toxic or dangerous reagents will be described. Unfortunately, differences in risk mitigation and risk management between industry and academia (at bench, prep and pilot scales) limits the applicability of such solutions. Even in industry, Chemical Health & Safety investment is rare without a motivating casualty or fatality.

Pharmaceutical industry best practices in lessons learned: ELN implementation of Merck's reaction review policy

254th National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.