ISO 14001 in Biotech: What It Means for Life Science Researchers

Posted on by Promega

This blog is guest-authored by Corey Meek, Corporate Responsibility Program Manager

Promega has achieved ISO 14001 certification for environmental management systems.

Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that our customers’ procurement teams are increasingly asking us about ISO 14001 certification. As a company that has long set ambitious sustainability goals, we have been heartened to see more labs and life science companies incorporating environmental impact into their planning and purchasing. To support our customers looking for external validation of environmental management, we announced in mid-2025 that Promega Madison has achieved ISO 14001:2015 certification.

ISO 14001 certification goes far beyond reporting and reducing our carbon footprint. It represents how we integrate environmental sustainability across complex operations to achieve ambitious environmental objectives. For scientists evaluating potential suppliers, it signals our commitment to sustainability without compromising the product consistency and reliability your lab depends on.

What is ISO 14001?

ISO 14001 is an internationally recognized standard that defines requirements for environmental management systems. This captures the processes we use to identify, control and reduce our environmental impacts. Unlike regulations that set specific pollution limits, ISO 14001 establishes a framework that includes setting environmental objectives, implementing operational controls, monitoring performance and driving continual improvement. The standard mandates leadership accountability and requires a third-party audit, annual surveillance and recertification every three years.

In practice, this means that we document every significant environmental aspect of our operations, from chemical waste streams in manufacturing to energy consumption in our facilities. We establish controls for each: procedures for handling hazardous materials, protocols for managing wastewater, systems for tracking energy use. We document incidents, investigate root causes, train employees and implement corrective actions to stay on target. Third-party auditors verify annually that these systems are functioning effectively and meeting the requirements of the ISO 14001 standard.

Our certification isn’t a one-time checkbox; it’s a commitment to continual improvement through the same management disciplines used in quality systems. We identify risks and establish operational controls for significant environmental aspects. When issues arise, we use structured nonconformance and corrective action processes.

How Does Environmental Management Connect to Quality and Supply Chain Reliability?

ISO 14001 and ISO 9001 (Quality Management Systems) share fundamental processes such as document control, training and competence requirements, change control procedures, nonconformance and corrective action (NC/CAPA) systems, equipment controls and internal audit protocols.

At Promega, all our major manufacturing and R&D sites are covered by both certifications. When we evaluate changes through our change control process, we assess both quality and environmental implications simultaneously. The partnership between our quality assurance and environmental management teams strengthens both systems and reduces operational blind spots.

This integration is important because environmental management doesn’t operate separately from product development and manufacturing. Hazardous materials handling, for example, requires environmental compliance, worker safety protocols and quality control simultaneously. The discipline required for ISO 14001 certification directly supports the manufacturing consistency researchers depend on for reproducible results. Environmental incident management and emergency response protocols reduce disruptions that could affect product availability and distribution.

What sustainability metrics are we measuring?

 ISO 14001 certification requires us to establish measurable environmental objectives and monitor our performance against them. Our organizational objectives include regulatory compliance verification, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, water consumption reduction and waste reduction. For example, we’re currently managing 87% of our hazardous waste through reclamation and recovery methods.

These objectives are monitored through multiple mechanisms: energy consumption and natural gas usage tracking, environmental incident documentation and analysis, internal and external compliance inspections, third-party assessment, and regular management review of performance data.

These quantifiable objectives are more powerful than aspirational statements. Annual third-party audits provide independent verification of our environmental performance. When procurement teams evaluate suppliers, they can choose to rely on ISO 14001 certification rather than conducting their own environmental audits. Most importantly, we approach sustainability strategically and responsibly by building robust processes rather than looking for quick wins. This means our gains are scalable, while safeguarding the consistency researchers using Promega products need for reproducible results.

ISO 14001 at Promega: Looking ahead

This certification requires us to demonstrate through third-party audits that our environmental management systems are effective over time. By focusing on measurable objectives and continuous improvement, we’re reducing our environmental impact in responsible ways that align with established standards and expectations.

In upcoming articles, we’ll explore how these ISO 14001 principles apply to processes and operations at Promega. Environmental management isn’t an isolated program; it’s infused in everything we do, from early product development to shipping of ready-to-use kits. As sustainability becomes increasingly important in procurement decisions, we’re committed to the environmental transparency and operational discipline that support your research goals.

Corey Meek is the Corporate Responsibility Program Manager at Promega.

Learn more about Promega Corporate Responsibility at https://www.promega.com/corporate-responsibility-csr/

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Search for New England’s Disappearing Cottontail

Posted on by Anna Bennett

Connecticut is a small yet ecologically interesting state. Over 85% of the human population lives in cities, yet more than 60% of the land is covered by forest, creating a diverse mix of habitats where wildlife and urban life overlap. In this landscape, bobcats have staged an impressive comeback over the past several decades, reclaiming their role as one of the region’s top predators. But as bobcat numbers rise, a quieter story is unfolding alongside them: the New England cottontail, the region’s only native rabbit, is vanishing.

a brown rabbit facing the camera with grass in the background.
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When Cancer Research Depends on Quality RNA: Maxwell® RSC in the Lab

Posted on by Promega

Reliable molecular research starts with reliable sample preparation. Two recently published cancer biology studies illustrate this well, and both studies relied on the Maxwell® RSC platform to extract RNA from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue, the archival format that makes up the bulk of clinical pathology material.

With Maxwell Instruments and chemistries for FFPE samples, RNA quality is suitable for many critical assays.

Mapping Molecular Targets in a Rare Thyroid Cancer

A 2025 study published in Endocrine Pathology focused on poorly differentiated thyroid carcinoma (PDTC), a rare and aggressive thyroid cancer subtype with limited treatment options once surgery is no longer curative (1). The research question was straightforward but clinically urgent: how many PDTC cases harbor mutations that could be targeted with existing or emerging therapies?

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Before the First Dose

Posted on by Elise Johnson

Kierkegaard observed that one of humanity’s enduring tensions is that while life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards. It’s a truth medicine knows intimately: in the treatment that worked until it didn’t, the resistance that arrived without warning, the moment a doctor has to tell a patient that the drug that was helping has stopped. Not because anyone made a mistake, but because the critical knowledge that would have mattered arrived too late, if at all.

A recent paper from the National Cancer Institute is, in a small but meaningful way, science’s pursuit of that elusive foresight: an understanding that emerges early enough, for once, to change what happens next.

The Elegant Idea

For decades, chemotherapy has worked by brute force, flooding the body with toxins designed to kill rapidly dividing cells. The problem is that rapid division isn’t unique to cancer. Hair follicle cells, gut lining cells and immune cells also divide rapidly, which is why patients lose hair, lose energy and become susceptible to infection. Chemotherapy targets a behavior, but the drug has no way to tell a healthy cell from a cancerous one.

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) change that. Instead of targeting what cancer cells do, they target what cancer cells are. Cancer cells tend to display certain proteins on their surface in far greater numbers than healthy cells do. The antibody is engineered to seek out those proteins specifically. It navigates to its target, binds and waits for the cell to do what cells routinely do: pull it inside. Once there, the cell’s own digestive machinery (the lysosome) breaks down the chemical tether holding the toxin to the antibody, releasing the toxin to kill the cell from within. More than a dozen ADCs have received FDA approval in recent years, and the field is evolving fast.

What the Cell Does Next

But cancer cells don’t simply accept their fate. Even when an ADC delivers its payload perfectly—the antibody finds its target, the cell pulls it inside, the lysosome cuts the tether—a pump embedded in the cell membrane can grab the released toxin and throw it back out before it causes damage.

The delivery worked. The package got ejected anyway.

These pumps—ATP-binding cassette transporters, or more plainly, efflux pumps—are a normal feature of cell biology. Their job is cellular housekeeping, clearing out unwanted or toxic substances before they cause damage. Under the pressure of drug treatment, cancer cells do what life has always done under pressure: the ones best equipped to survive do. The same mechanism that has shaped living things for billions of years now works against the treatment. Not all cancer cells are identical, and the ones that happen to produce more pumps survive while others don’t, gradually shifting the tumor toward resistance.

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Detecting Neuroinflammation in Microglia and Astrocytes

Posted on by Simon Moe

The brain is one of the most complex and fascinating parts of biology. Thankfully, it’s also remarkably good at protecting itself. When exposed to a pathogen, an injury or even misfolded proteins, microglia and astrocytes function as the central nervous system’s (CNS) primary immune defenders. They mount an inflammatory response by releasing cytokines and working to contain the damage. Yet this same system can malfunction or not resolve, which manifests as devastating consequences.

Chronic neuroinflammation is now recognized as a shared characteristic across some of the most common and difficult-to-treat neurological conditions. A 2023 review in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy highlighted the dualistic nature of neuroinflammation: while acute responses serve a protective role, chronic or dysregulated inflammatory signaling can initiate and accelerate neurodegeneration, identifying these pathways as priority targets for therapeutic intervention (Zhang et al., 2023). A 2025 review in Science reinforced this view, noting that within Multiple Sclerosis, disease-modifying therapies targeting neuroinflammation have seen the most clinical success (Shi & Yong, 2025). This could suggest applications within neurological conditions where the same inflammatory mechanisms are at work.

Understanding how and where these inflammatory signals originate in the CNS is an active area of preclinical research. One cytokine being actively studied is IL-6. IL-6 is produced by several cell types, including astrocytes and microglia in the CNS. As a key mediator of inflammatory responses, it mediates pro-inflammatory effects through its trans-signaling, which occurs via soluble IL-6 receptors. Dysregulation of this mechanism may contribute to the chronic neuroinflammation seen in several neurological conditions. Characterizing how and when IL-6 is secreted from CNS cells is an important step toward understanding the neuroinflammatory processes underlying these disorders.

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Some St. Patrick’s Day Science: Green Rivers, Four-Leaf Clovers and Optics of a Good Pint

Posted on by Shannon Sindermann

St. Patrick’s Day means different things depending on where you are in the world. In Ireland, it’s a national holiday steeped in culture and tradition: parades, traditional music sessions and, for many, a pint of Guinness accompanied by a hearty “Sláinte” are all part of the day. Here in the American Midwest, we tend to turn that same spirit into a full spectacle. Green everything as far as the eye can see, including somehow an entire river.

Whatever your version of the holiday looks like, there is a lot of fun science behind it. Here is a look at Midwest St. Patrick’s Day through a lab lens.

The Chicago River: Where Orange Becomes Green

St. Patricks Day, Chicago River, Green

Every St. Patrick’s Day, the Chicago Journeymen Plumbers Local 130 heads out on the river and, in roughly 45 minutes, turns a stretch of the Chicago River a surreal emerald green (7, 11). The twist: the dye goes in orange.

The tradition dates to the early 1960s, rooted in a practical idea. Dye had been used to trace leaks and flow in the city’s waterways and someone realized the same concept could be repurposed into a public spectacle (7,11). The exact formula has been kept secret ever since, described only as environmentally friendly and designed to fade after a few hours (1,7,11).

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Light Has a Favorite Color, But It’s Complicated

Posted on by Elise Johnson

Last spring, my niece and I made a trip to a home improvement store to put together a Mother’s Day planter for my sister. My niece had a clear vision: my sister’s favorite color is blue, so we were going to buy blue flowers. We walked every aisle of the garden center. We checked the annuals, the perennials, and the hanging baskets then left with purple, red, and a grumpy 7-year-old.

It turns out we were not up against a bad selection. We were up against biology.

The Problem with Blue

Blue is one of the rarest colors in the natural world. The food industry is currently finding that out the hard way. There is a good chance you have eaten something blue today. Maybe it was the frosting on a birthday cake, the coating on some M&M’s® candies, or the sports drink in your refrigerator. That blue almost certainly came from a petroleum-based synthetic dye, and for the first time in decades, the food industry is being asked to find something better.

The FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 in January 2025, and pressure has been building around the remaining synthetic dyes ever since, including Blue No. 1 and Blue No. 2. Major food brands have begun announcing plans to reformulate.

There is just one problem. Blue is genuinely, stubbornly hard to make in nature. It turns out that blue has almost nothing to do with color, and almost everything to do with light.

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Why BRETSA™ Target Engagement Matters for Drug Discovery

Posted on by Michele Arduengo, PhD

Drug discovery researchers face a fundamental constraint in their work to develop safe, effective therapeutics: the vast majority of the human proteome remains inaccessible to conventional small molecule approaches. Proteins without defined binding pockets, those lacking known chemical probes, and protein targets that fail to translate from biochemical assays into cellular models have long been considered out of reach of standard drug discovery screening tools. As Dixit et al. describe, developing biochemical or cellular assays for all genome-encoded targets “is not scalable and likely impossible as most proteins have ill-defined or unknown activity” — these are what the authors call “the dark undruggable expanses” of the proteome [1].

That gap is now narrowing. Promega Corporation recently launched the TarSeer™ BRETSA™ Target Engagement System, a live-cell target engagement platform designed to bring previously challenging targets within reach of early-stage drug discovery.

The Problem: A Translation Gap in Early Discovery

Drug discovery teams regularly encounter a frustrating disconnect. A compound may show strong binding activity in a biochemical assay, only to fail when tested in a cellular environment. Without target-specific cellular assays, which generally aren’t available for poorly characterized proteins, researchers face difficult choices when deciding which compounds to advance through the drug development pipeline.

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A Live-Cell NanoBRET Assay Shines Light on Toxic RNA–Protein Interactions in Myotonic Dystrophy

Posted on by Johanna Lee
How NanoBRET works image.

RNA doesn’t just carry genetic instructions—it also interacts with proteins to regulate nearly every aspect of gene expression, from splicing to translation. When those interactions go awry, the consequences can be devastating. In myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), the most common adult-onset muscular dystrophy, a toxic RNA repeat expansion hijacks a critical protein called MBNL1, trapping it in nuclear clumps called foci. This leads to widespread splicing defects and progressive muscle wasting. But studying these toxic interactions inside living cells—and finding small molecules that can disrupt them—has been a significant challenge.

A recent study led by the Scripps Institute may have a solution. The study introduces a NanoBRET™ assay that can monitor the interaction between the expanded CUG RNA repeats and MBNL1 protein in real time, in live cells. Their findings demonstrate how this platform can be used not only to detect disease-driving RNA–protein complexes but also to identify small molecules that break them apart.

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How Enzymes Are Powering A New Generation of Micro-Robots

Posted on by Anna Bennett
Cute, tiny robot. White body, black features, and blue glowing eyes.

Many consider enzymes the workhorses of biochemistry (move over, mitochondria)—catalyzing reactions, breaking down substrates, keeping the machinery of life humming along. But a growing number of researchers are re-envisioning what enzymes can do. Instead of facilitating chemistry, what if enzymes could steer and even guide tiny robots to a tumor? 

That’s exactly what’s happening in the rapidly expanding field of enzyme-powered microscopic robots (a.k.a “microrobots”). Microrobots are tiny, engineered devices—often smaller than the width of a human hair—built to perform tasks inside the body that would be difficult or impossible at a larger scale, like delivering drugs to a specific tissue. A recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California offers a particularly elegant example that we highlight below1.

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