It’s been a while, but…welcome to a new edition of #MeetOurPartners! This time, we have the pleasure to introduce Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland. This partner has a vast experience in a particularly special technique. Let’s discover what it is.
When we talk about Trinity College Dublin, we’re talking about spray drying. This team has decades of experience in this method, which involves dissolving compounds in a minimal amount of solvent. The resulting mixture is then atomised into tiny droplets, followed by the isolation of the new compound by quickly drying the droplets thanks to heated gas. And when we say quickly, we mean extremely quickly as the drying takes just milliseconds.
Spray drying is then a continuous, one-step process, making it a highly valuable option for pharmaceutical production. Unlike traditional batch methods, it can run uninterrupted for long periods without the need to pause it to collect the product or restart the synthesis. While we work at lab scale, industrial pharmaceutical spray dryers can produce hundreds of kilogrammes —or even several tonnes— of compounds.
Another important feature of this method is that it can be used not only for chemical synthesis, but also for process intensification. All components, including excipients and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), can be combined and processed into what is essentially the final pharmaceutical formulation. It’s almost like having an all-in-one pharmaceutical technique!
You might be a little bit surprised to learn that we are using a technique that uses solvents. After all, we’ve explained in the past the environmental problems that solvents represent. However, the amount used is minimal, we prioritise green solvents, and more importantly, we can recover and reuse them.
Returning to our team in Dublin, they bring together the expertise of a chemist, a material scientist, and a pharmacist, an ideal combo to address the mechanochemical synthesis of APIs and how these compounds will behave in the final formulation, all with spray drying at the core. As such, Trinity College Dublin contributes to various work packages (WPs) in our project.
First things first. In WP2, lab synthesis, they are exploring the potential of spray drying for chemical transformation of compounds in a more environmentally friendly way. This is essentially making synthesis simpler and more efficient by eliminating unnecessary steps.
But our Dublin researchers want to go further. They also focus on multicomponent systems such salts and co-crystals, de duty of WP3. Spray drying allows them to isolate these solid forms. Together with this, they are also studying how to combine APIs and excipients, and co-spray dry them together.
As we previously said, this last feature makes spray drying very interesting for scale-up, the duty of WP5 and the last WP in which Trinity College Dublin participates. One of the key contributions of our colleagues here is also to understand how the properties of drugs, synthesised by mechanochemistry will behave in the final formulation.
The dream of this team would be to achieve a medicine fully synthesised by mechanochemistry, from start to finish. That means combining all the aspects of chemical synthesis and formulation into one-step process.