Making Sustainability More “Sustainable”: Driving Transformation at Scale within Biopharma

This blog post was written by Matt McLoughlin, SVP Compliance at Scientist.com.

As an online procurement orchestration platform, our physical footprint at Scientist.com may be relatively small, but our influence within the life sciences industry can be significant. Over the last decade, we have managed more than $3 billion in outsourced research spend. That scale grants us a unique opportunity along with profound responsibility.

This past year, we updated our corporate sustainability strategy to step beyond our traditional role as a passive procurement tool. Our new vision is straightforward: become an active driver of industry transformation. Our goal is simple: make sustainability a competitive advantage - rather than an administrative hurdle.

The Challenge: Moving Beyond Compliance

If you look at the current biopharma landscape, one of the most glaring challenges is the lack of standardized expectations across the industry when it comes to sustainability.

For suppliers, this fragmentation increases operational complexity and drives up costs, as they are forced to answer slightly different sustainability surveys for each individual client. For pharmaceutical organizations, the challenge is operationalization, or figuring out how to translate high-level corporate sustainability strategies into the day-to-day sourcing decisions made by individual scientists and procurement managers.

At Scientist.com, we have solved both sides of this equation.

The Idea: Embedding Actionable Data into Sourcing

To bridge the gap between strategy and execution, we have built layers of practical innovation directly into our platform workflow:

• The Sustainability RFI: Working in close collaboration with major pharma companies, we launched a free, standardized sustainability questionnaire available to every platform user. By doing so, we remove the “entry cost” of sharing crucial ESG data.
• Decision-Support Tools: We developed a certification tool that allows suppliers to showcase their verified credentials — such as CDP, SBTi, or My Green Lab certifications — directly within the active sourcing workflow.
• Active Highlighting: We now annotate the profiles of suppliers that have provided comprehensive sustainability information. A decision-maker no longer has to hunt for sustainability data; it is served to them exactly when and where they are choosing a supplier to work with.

Looking ahead, we will continue to build on this momentum. Soon, we will be officially launching our 2026 Sustainability Awards to further incentivize, recognize and celebrate the suppliers who are actively leading the charge.

The Impact: Scale, Education and Ecosystem Building

We are already seeing incredible traction. Hundreds of suppliers are actively using these new features to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. But data is only half the battle, as building a true sustainability ecosystem requires education.

To bridge the knowledge gap for smaller suppliers, we have hosted collaborative, educational webinars featuring insights from industry leaders like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Sanofi and GSK. Furthermore, we have plans to host an industry-wide sustainability meeting to share best practices and, crucially, simplify and align requirements to increase compliance across the entire global supply chain.

The Ask: Let’s Partner to Remove the Blockers

As an independent, third-party facilitator, Scientist.com is uniquely positioned to unite the industry around otherwise disparate sustainability goals. However, software alone cannot shift an industry. We need active engagement to move faster.

We want to partner with both our clients and our suppliers to identify and remove the operational blockers that keep the wider industry from achieving its sustainability goals.

Ultimately, our goal is to make sustainability “sustainable” for research organizations. Together, we can shift the perception of sustainability from a tedious administrative exercise into what it should be: a core, undeniable principle of doing business. For more information on our initiatives or to find out how you can utilize our sustainability tools on the platform, reach out to sustainability@scientist.com.