SubscribeProsonix Ltd (Oxford UK) and Chiralabs (Kidlington, Oxon, UK) unique CrystalGEMTM Predictive Crystallization Technology has won the Gold Award for Innovation at this years CPhI 2005 Worldwide tradeshow in Madrid, beating 6 other major international corporations in the process.
CPhI Worlwide is the largest tradeshow of its kind in the world. CrystalGEM is revolutionising the way that pharmaceutical companies undertake their crystallization screening activities, which are a critical and costly part of the drug development process. In the first year of marketing, Prosonix and Chiralabs have secured several new international pharmaceutical clients and the business is set to grow substantially in 2006.
Unlike other computational models which have historically attempted to predict crystallization from the molecular level and have shown to be of limited value, the structurally driven CrystalGEM technology developed by Chiralabs is based on the undertaking and analysis of thousands of real crystallization systems using single or mixed combinations of over eighty commercially available solvents, couple to proven and proprietary pattern recognition algorithms. The CrystalGEM technology allows the prediction of solubilities and an indication of the crystallization outcomes in mixed solvent conditions, including morphological and polymorphic proclivity.
Information on likely crystallization, morphology, habit and polymorphism are obtained allowing the efficient selection and ranking of conditions worth experimental exploration. Importantly the approach rapidly highlights the areas of solvent space that have the highest chance of delivering viable crystalline material, and hence suitable for scale up and manufacture. When coupled to inhouse microcrystallization technology, compounds can be effectively and efficiently screened, often generating high quality single crystals suitable for further crystallographic analysis and absolute polymorph confirmation.
Amazingly, unlike other typical high throughout screening approaches, a full CrystalGEM study including the microcrystallization screen only requires around 100mg of compound, offering hitherto unattainable physical form answers in discovery and lead optimisation. Classical random HTS approaches may now be obsolete.