For drug substance manufacturing,
it is necessary to have a robust
crystallization process that can isolate quality active pharmaceutical
ingredients with the desired crystal size distribution (CSD). This
study presents a novel integrated crystallizer that combines cooling
and antisolvent crystallization with wet milling and annealing operations
to produce crystals with narrow size distributions. The incorporation
of a wet mill and subsequent annealing vessel were carried out for
size reduction and fines dissolution, respectively. The influential
process parameters on CSD were identified by investigating the crystallization
of verubecestat with the integrated system. Data-rich experimentation
and enhanced process understanding were achieved by implementing process
analytical technologies, such as attenuated total reflectance-Fourier
transform infrared and focused beam reflectance measurement. Results
show that the CSD can be tightly tuned through mill configuration,
mill speed, and annealing temperature. Increasing mill rotational
speed and using a denser rotor–stator teeth arrangement reduced
crystal size, while a higher dissolution temperature was conducive
to tightening CSD by dissolving fines and creating additional supersaturation
for crystal growth. Results from the complete integrated system were
compared to configurations without annealing vessel, which revealed
that breakage, attrition, and secondary nucleation induced by milling
led to wider CSD.
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