(612e) Multiphysics Modeling and Simulation of Microfluidic Platforms for Screening of Pharmaceutical Polymorphs 

Polymorphs are the crystalline materials with different molecular arrangements and hence varying physicochemical properties such as bioavailability, chemical stability, and mechanical strength. Almost 60% of marketed oral drugs are produced in the solid form, whose quality is mostly determined by their polymorphic structure. Due to the regulatory issues, it is essential to develop a platform to effectively screen these polymorphs to identify stable and metastable forms of drugs. In the pharmaceutical industry, the commonly employed technique to screen polymorphs is a microtiter plate method which uses 96-well, 384-well, and 1586-well plates. Such high-throughput technique can evaluate up to 10,000 compounds per day. However, setbacks are often encountered during scale-up due to differences in the environmental conditions of a microtiter plate and a real crystallizer. Here we propose a design of a novel microfluidic crystallizer that can potentially overcome the drawbacks of the microtiter plate method by inducing hydrodynamically controlled nucleation and growth of single crystals. Our microfluidic platform can control the supersaturation at the stagnation point where single crystal can nucleate and grow. In this talk, I will present the results from the Multiphysics simulations of microfluidic crystallization and propose an optimal design to enable high-throughput screening of polymorphs.