Predicting Crystallization of Amorphous Drugs with Terahertz Spectroscopy

What is it about?

The amorphous state has long been identified as a potential technology to bring poorly soluble drug molecules to the market but it comes with an inherent high risk of crystallisation over the shelf life of a medicine. This paper outlines a new technique that can be used to measure how easily a molecule crystallises from the amorphous solid state and hence could predict the amorphous stability.

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Why is it important?

We found that terahertz spectroscopy can measure the molecular mobility that governs crystallisation in a much more robust fashion compared to the commonly used techniques. Our work also highlighted that it is not sufficient to keep an amorphous material at a temperature slightly below the glass transition temperature but that a much lower temperature is needed for this purpose (about 2/3 of the glass transition temperature in Kelvins).