Digital Process Design to Define and Deliver Pharmaceutical Particle Attributes

A digital-first approach to produce quality particles of an active pharmaceutical ingredient across crystallisation, washing and drying is presented, minimising material requirements and experi-mental burden during development. To demonstrate current predictive modelling capabilities, the production of two particle sizes (D90 = 42 and 120 & mu;m) via crystallisation was targeted to deliver a predicted, measurable difference in in vitro dissolution performance. A parameterised population balance model considering primary nucleation, secondary nucleation and crystal growth was used to select the modes of production for the different particle size batches. Solubility prediction aided solvent selection steps which also considered manufacturability and safety selection cri-teria. A wet milling model was parameterised and used to successfully produce a 90 g product batch with a particle size D90 of 49.3 & mu;m, which was then used as the seeds for cooling crystal-lisation. A rigorous approach to minimising physical phenomena observed experimentally was implemented, and successfully predicted the required conditions to produce material satisfying the particle size design objective of D90 of 120 & mu;m in a seeded cooling crystallisation using a 5 -stage MSMPR cascade. Product material was isolated using the filtration and washing processes designed, producing 71.2 g of agglomerated product with a primary particle D90 of 128 & mu;m. Based on experimental observations, the population balance model was reparametrised to increase accuracy by inclusion of an agglomeration term for the continuous cooling crystallisation. The dissolution performance for the two crystallised products is also demonstrated, and after 45 min 104.0 mg of the D90 of 49.3 & mu;m material had dissolved, compared with 90.5 mg of the agglom-erated material with D90 of 128 & mu;m. Overall, 1513 g of the model compound was used to develop and demonstrate two laboratory scale manufacturing processes with specific particle size targets. This work highlights the challenges associated with a digital-first approach and limitations in current first-principles models are discussed that include dealing ab initio with encrustation, fouling or factors that affect dissolution other than particle size. & COPY; 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).