Crystal Growth Kinetics of an Industrial Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient: Implications of Different Representations of Supersaturation and Simultaneous Growth Mechanisms
Gustavo Lunardon Quilló, Satyajeet Bhonsale, Bjorn Gielen, Jan Van Impe, A. Collas, Christos Xiouras
Abstract
The crystal growth kinetics of a proprietary active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) was investigated by isothermal seeded batch de-supersaturation experiments in solvent mixtures using the “true” thermodynamic representation of the supersaturation driving force, which considers the activities of the saturated and supersaturated states. Three approaches to approximate the experimentally inaccessible activity coefficients of the supersaturated state were assessed, as well as the most common approximation, which omits the activity coefficients altogether. Subsequently, the supersaturation data from the different expressions were fed into a population balance model to estimate kinetic parameters for the empirical, Burton–Cabrera–Frank, and birth-and-spread growth models. The results demonstrate that the approach used to compute the supersaturation alters the estimated kinetic parameters significantly, having potentially serious implications for their physical interpretation and for extracting the physical properties they represent in lumped form. Moreover, including the chemical activities in the supersaturation leads to kinetic parameters with a tighter joint confidence interval and weaker parameter correlation that can better explain the experimental observation of the API growing appreciably only under higher antisolvent amounts. Finally, the simultaneous occurrence of multiple crystal growth mechanisms is investigated, concluding that the additive contribution of B+S and BCF best explains the supersaturation decay observed in the experiments for this API.