Crystal clear

A technology that could help pharmaceutical companies significantly reduce the costs of developing drug compounds by monitoring crystals as they form has been created by a UK university.

Researchers at

and Durham-based industry partner

have developed a technique that uses powder X-ray diffraction to analyse crystal forms of a drug while it is being processed in a reactor (online) rather than removing a sample from the reactor to test (offline).

'We have refined the technology to the extent that we have a system you can wheel into a pilot plant and hook it up. Basically you can pump your slurry around the instrument and while you are doing crystallisation of some kind, which might take several hours, you can actually monitor what's going on,' said Dr Robert Hammond at Leeds.

The temperature-controlled cell is connected to a reactor, or crystalliser, using coaxial pipes, which are insulated with a heating jacket to ensure the sample travels through the cell and back into the reactor under constant temperature conditions, as a change in heat levels would affect the crystallisation process. When the sample flows into the device, an X-ray generator illuminates the sample and a measurement of diffraction is taken from the flowing slurry.