ABSTRACT
Alastair J. Florence Solid-State Research Group, Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K.
INTRODUCTION The development of experimental methods for increasing the throughput and effi - ciency of all stages of drug discovery and development is an important area of research within the pharmaceutical industry. In the context of physical form discovery of pharmaceuticals, the fundamental aim when establishing a rigorous experimental crystallization search strategy is to achieve as wide a coverage of crystallization conditions and methods as possible within the constraints of available time, material, and resources. For the purposes of this chapter, physical form will be taken to mean any solid form of the compound being examined, whether crystalline (polymorphs, solvates, salts, and co-crystals) or non-crystalline (amorphous). Automated crystallization approaches allow the basic process steps involved in a typical manual solution recrystallization method ( Fig. 1 ) to be effi ciently replicated over large numbers of parallel experiments. In principle, this enables the routine implementation of search strategies designed to maximize the diversity of crystallization conditions tested, allowing the experimental search to be carried out over a fi ner grid (e.g., a larger solvent library).
