Medicines security and bioprospecting: A future agenda for pharmaceutical research

Humanity is at an extraordinary moment in history, where our interwoven future in Gaia depends on showing reverence for the modulation of our resource limits after significant losses of biodiversity and encroaching environmental change, including disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, and changing climates. Engaging with the interconnectedness of all life on Earth and integrating sustainability and optimization of the valuable, renewable resources for future generations are essential beginning actions. Fostering economic and resource sustainability deepens the focus for contemporary research priorities toward assuring access to biological agents needed by the consumer/patient. Based on the outcomes of the COP28/29/30 and COP15/16 global meetings on climate change and biodiversity conservation, respectively, “transitioning” in the next 25 years toward extensive defossilization will dramatically reduce the available chemical supplies for generating synthetic and natural medicines. Medicine Security, a component of national security, has six major facets, the first of which centers on maintaining medicinal and biological agent accessibility. How will that be possible if the fossil-fuel-derived resources for synthetic and natural medicinal agents are dissipated and the processing of coal for chemicals becomes environmentally unacceptable? A major paradigm shift in pharmaceutical research is therefore necessary. By 2050, a wholly sustainable sourcing profile for medicinal agents will be necessary to respond to future patient requirements. Active bioprospecting for sustainable resources from nature, including biowaste, will be required for new, replaceable agents, and for the identification of starting materials for new synthetic products and their development as pharmaceutical agents. Long-term planning at the highest levels in a country between government, industry, the health care system, and academia is now essential to answer the pertinent question: “Where and how will wholly sustainable, bioactive agents originate in 2050, 2060, and beyond to assure that patient needs are met through medicines security?” The patients will be waiting.