Pharma Industry 4.0: Literature review and research opportunities in sustainable pharmaceutical supply chains

•The sustainable pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) management is still a niche area for both pharmaceutical and supply chain management researchers. The exploitation of the emerging technologies of Pharma Industry 4.0 facilitates sustainable value creation, leads to more agile, smart and personalised pharma industry.•A more sustainable PSC should be applied to match future smart operations and management of the pharmaceutical products across the entire life cycle, from manufacturing to end-users. However, both internal and external inhibitors should be overcome, which include: high investment; poor support by senior managers; lack of well training expertise; enforcement of regulations; the insufficient coordination and communication beyond the boundaries of the PSC; the paucity of assessment systems and benchmarks; ineffective business incentives; poor end-customer awareness.•The sustainable PSC can benefit from Industry 4.0 in terms of four main aspects: enhancing the flexibility of the PSC for patient-centric drug supplies; improving the effectiveness of coordination and communication across different entities; reducing waste and pollution at different stages; and enabling a more autonomous decision-making process for supply chain managers, especially for healthcare sectors.•Future research interest can concentrate on: cross-linking coordination and cooperation, eco-friendly end-of-life products disposal, proactive recall management, new benchmarks and measurement of sustainable performance, new regulation system design, and effects of incentives for sustainable activities. The exploitation of the emerging technologies of Pharma Industry 4.0 facilitates sustainable value creation, leads to more agile, smart and personalised pharma industry, and thereby, in the long-run, enables pharma companies to obtain competitive advantages. A more sustainable pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) should be implemented to match future operations and management of the pharmaceutical products across the entire life cycle. The main purpose of this study is to identify the potential sustainability barriers of PSC and to investigate how Industry 4.0 can be applied in the sustainable PSC paradigms. This paper systematically reviews 33 relevant articles concerning sustainable PSC and Industry 4.0, taken from peer-reviewed academic journals over a decade (2008–2018). Based on content analysis, we find that the major challenges that inhibit inclusion of sustainability in the PSCs