Material aspect 4: We care about the environment, health, and safety

Our mission is to bring innovative medicines with novel modes of action to patients suffering from severe diseases in the most sustainable way, caring about the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees and respecting our planet by keeping our environmental footprint to a minimum.

In addition, we operate in a highly regulated sector and are hence subject to a strict set of laws and regulations related to impact on the environment, and to the health, safety and well-being of employees.

To ensure adherence to our mission and compliance with legislation we established an EHS  group department responsible for the development of an Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) management system based on the international ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 standards, and for proposing an annual action plan to promote environmentally sound practices and health, safety and well-being at work. Management guarantees the implementation of this action plan and our EHS efforts are anchored in the shared responsibility of our staff: every employee is responsible for protecting people and the environment in and around his or her workplace. We perform internal and external audits to monitor compliance.

We promote initiatives to eliminate accidents and illness, and to provide a safe work environment and business processes.

We maintain safety monitoring records, in compliance with applicable legislation, and ensure that training of employees takes place on all handling of hazardous materials, laboratory and other safety aspects, and on other relevant policies for conducting our business. In 2020, our three research centers jointly reported 2 lost time incidents (one resulting from slip, trip & fall and one from a cut) which resulted in 6 lost calendar days.

We currently have no production sites, we do not own buildings, and our facilities have only minor environmental liabilities such as waste handling and emissions from fume hoods. Nonetheless, we aim to reduce our environmental impact further, for example by recycling and replacing paper by digital means to the extent possible, and we are committed to selecting our production partners with care.

Other examples include the bikes at our facilities in Mechelen and Leiden used by employees who need to commute between the buildings on site as well as the gradual greening of our car fleet.