A fireside chat with AstraZeneca’s Dafni Kika at ISPE MAST Showcase made the case that decarbonization, AI, and people-centered leadership are converging into one operating discipline for pharma.
When Dafni Bika, Ph.D., started out as a materials scientist and chemical engineer, nobody in her labs said “sustainability.” They called it value engineering — wringing every bit of value out of a process while cutting the energy, materials, and waste it took to run. Decades later, as AstraZeneca’s Senior Vice President and Global Head of Pharmaceutical Technology & Development, Bika has watched that instinct move from the margins of process design to the center of corporate strategy. It is now, she told a packed room at the 2026 MAST Showcase, “embedded in everything we do.”
The fireside chat — Advancing Innovation & Sustainability in Life Sciences — was the marquee leadership conversation at ISPE Chesapeake Region’s flagship event, hosted by committee chairs Matt Dillon, Application Specialist at PureFlow, and Jennifer Bullock, Director of Environmental Sustainability at AstraZeneca. Bika was interviewed by Ida Namur, Vice President with AECOM’s Global Advisory Team. Over forty minutes, the two connected molecule design, supplier contracts, AI-enabled development, and executive compensation — arguing these are not separate initiatives but facets of one discipline.
The honest math of a pharma footprint
Bika didn’t open with aspiration. She opened with a number, and asked the audience to guess it first. AstraZeneca’s carbon footprint — across operations, product supply, and purchased materials — is roughly 6,000 kilotons of CO2 equivalent, and growing as the pipeline grows. The challenge isn’t simply to cut emissions, but to cut them against a rising baseline.
Where does it come from? The pharmaceutical sector accounts for about 5% of global emissions — more, she noted, than the airline industry. Within AstraZeneca, roughly half the total comes from one product category: pressurized metered-dose inhalers, whose propellants carry a very high global warming potential. Another quarter comes from other products, largely the solvents used in synthetic API manufacturing. The final quarter — and hardest to influence — sits in Scope 3: raw materials, excipients, packaging, services. The emissions AstraZeneca directly controls, Scope 1 and 2, are only about 2% of the total. The easiest wins, in other words, are the smallest.
Decoupling growth from emissions
Still, the proof point matters. Over the past decade, AstraZeneca’s revenue roughly doubled — from $30 billion to $60 billion — while Scope 1 and 2 emissions fell nearly 90%, through biomethane and bio-sourced energy, a 25% cut in water use, fleet electrification, and a shift from air to sea freight. Eleven global sites have cut site emissions around 98%, with nearly 100% expected within the year.
Against that backdrop, Bika walked through AstraZeneca’s recently updated targets: a 35% cut in total footprint by 2030, on the way to net zero by 2045, plus tripling energy-resource effectiveness and expanding the company’s health-education reach toward more than a billion people. “I cannot guarantee we’re not going to change them in five years,” she said — framing target-setting as an iterative discipline, not a one-time declaration.
Scope 3: contracts, not encouragement
The most pointed segment was about suppliers — where the largest share of the footprint lives, and which AstraZeneca cannot engineer away itself. Bika was candid about her own early skepticism that suppliers would adopt science-based targets without a real incentive. The answer wasn’t encouragement. It was contract language. AstraZeneca now embeds science-based-target requirements into supplier agreements, and retains the option not to work with those who don’t meet them. Roughly half of suppliers have already made the switch — expected to deliver around 500 kilotons of reduction by 2030.
The leverage multiplies when the industry moves together. Bika pointed to the Sustainable Markets Initiative, whose healthcare task force is led by AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot alongside peers including Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, and Novartis. “This is not an area we want to compete,” she said. “This is an area we want to collaborate.” The commitment isn’t rhetorical: every function carries travel targets in dollars and CO2, new buildings pursue LEED Gold with low-carbon cement and green steel, and — in what Bika called a sometimes “stressful” detail — senior executive bonuses are tied to hitting the metrics collectively.
The cost of doing it right
The inhaler story showed what execution costs. Because propellants drive roughly half the footprint, AstraZeneca partnered with Honeywell on a next-generation propellant that cuts the relevant global warming potential by 99.9%. But swapping a propellant in a pressurized inhaler is a major regulatory change. The company had to redevelop the affected respiratory medicines for asthma and COPD, re-prove safety, demonstrate identical performance, and resubmit across multiple agencies — close to seven years and several hundred million dollars in clinical studies. The honest price, Bika suggested, of decarbonizing a platform patients depend on.
“Soft AI”: getting the house in order first
On AI, Bika offered one of the session’s sharpest reframes: much of what gets called AI in drug development is really the unglamorous work that has to happen before AI can do anything useful. She described a staged progression — first structuring the data (AstraZeneca runs seven separate SAP systems, where the same concept is labeled differently across functions), then layering in mathematical and machine-learning models, and only then LLMs and agentic systems on top.
The payoff is process digital twins that simulate an entire manufacturing train in silico and run thousands of virtual experiments a day, while democratizing tools once reserved for specialists. But Bika was firm on the limit — she called it “soft AI,” with agents working alongside people, not replacing them. “We need the humans to be smarter than the machine,” she said. The sustainability link runs both ways: in-silico work avoids real materials and emissions, but computation has its own footprint — which is why AstraZeneca runs much of it on renewable-powered data centers in Sweden.
Innovation, cost, and the takeaway
Audience questions pressed on the tensions. Asked how to balance the sustainability premium against drug affordability, Bika pushed back on the premise that sustainability and cost always move together. The shift from batch to continuous manufacturing can deliver the same volume at roughly one-tenth the footprint and 60%-plus lower energy use; AstraZeneca’s “route manager” tool optimizes synthetic chemistry for the fewest steps, cutting water, solvents, and waste at once. She calls it “sustainability by design” — remove the waste before you create it. Done right, she argued, it is a business case, not a cost line.
For an ISPE Chesapeake audience of engineers and operations leaders, the most durable message may have been the one Bika carried from her earliest days in the lab: the instinct behind good sustainability — minimize waste, optimize the process, design the problem out — is the instinct behind good engineering. What has changed is that the discipline now runs from molecule design to the boardroom, with metrics and accountability attached. AstraZeneca moved its own-facility emissions 90% — and that is 2% of the problem. The real work is collective.
Editor’s note
Figures and quotations are drawn from the session transcript. Where the speaker flagged a data point as difficult to verify, it is attributed rather than stated as established fact. AstraZeneca’s published sustainability targets should be referenced for the company’s official figures.
