Case Studies in the Application of a Workflow-Based Crystallization Design for Optimized Impurity Rejection in Pharmaceutical Development

Crystallization is an important unit operation in pharmaceutical drug substance manufacturing for the isolation of organic products. Impurity control is a recurring critical quality attribute in most commercial pharmaceutical crystallization processes. A systematic workflow that can reveal the incorporation mechanism of various impurities during crystallization and guide us to understand impurity rejection is useful for crystallization process design. Such a workflow was recently published by Urwin et al. Herein, we present three case studies implementing this workflow, covering surface deposition, conglomerate formation, and agglomeration as principal routes for impurity incorporation during crystallization of a drug substance’s active pharmaceutical ingredient and its intermediates. We demonstrate the experimental steps to identify various impurity incorporation mechanisms and discuss the strategy for impurity rejection in each case. We built upon the previous approach to demonstrate a material sparing approach through our case studies. We highlight the value of stepwise dissolution and show the importance of doing it early in the impurity incorporation identification stage. At this stage, we introduce a missing incorporation mechanism in prior work, namely, conglomerate systems. We show how to identify and resolve this mode of incorporation mechanism through stepwise dissolution and solubility-limited rejection maps.