Novartis puts evaporative crystallisation to the test

A new technical poster produced by Genevac, in conjunction with the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research in Horsham, UK, examines the application of Genevac's eXalt evaporative crystallisation technology in drug discovery projects

eXalt is designed to control evaporation using restricting baffles. Using this technology, multiple solvents can be screened in parallel to identify optimum crystallisation conditions for amorphous materials.

In the pharmaceutical industry, physical form can pose a significant challenge for small molecule drug discovery projects transitioning between the optimisation and characterisation phases. A crystalline form is desirable to confirm absolute structure as well as to investigate solubility and the formulation of a specific morphic form.

The scope of the research described in the poster was to investigate the suitability of eXalt evaporative crystallisation technology for production of seed crystals from amorphous materials and to use these large crystals  for structure determination, identification of solvates / solvation exchange, identify polymorphs and to undertake co-crystal screening.

Results from this series of projects are presented. The researchers conclude that eXalt technology was shown to be a versatile tool and successfully applied to novel compound classes in multiple drug discovery projects. Furthermore, as a non-destructive technique enabling structure confirmation data to be obtained from samples as small as 5 mg, eXalt is well suited for use in the optimisation phase of early research projects.