To protect this fragile ecosystem and to manage risk in the drug supply chain, scientists have created synthetic alternatives to horseshoe crab blood to test drug safety over the last four decades. Adoption of these methods has been slow, yet scientists and conservationists are hopeful that recent changes to testing guidelines will make the industry less reliant on these ancient creatures.
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Revive & Restore recently launched the Sustainability Scorecards for Endotoxin Testing, which track the adoption of sustainable alternatives to LAL by pharmaceutical companies. These scorecards are what Bennett called the “first public metric that measures the progress of the pharmaceutical industry” in sustainable endotoxin testing. She added, “It’s an accountability tool. We like to say [it’s] a gamified version of the environmental stewardship that we would like to see in the industry.”
Revive & Restore collaborated with the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition and various pharmaceutical companies to develop the scorecards, which measure public acknowledgement of replacing LAL, reducing LAL use, and whether pharmaceutical companies have adopted synthetic alternatives for new or legacy products.
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This is exactly what Bolden said about Eli Lilly, which sits at the top of the leaderboard. “[rFC has] benefited us from a quality perspective. It’s secured our supply chain. It’s better obviously just from a biodiversity and ethical perspective, and then for us, frankly, it’s been cost-effective,” he said.