C3 and Chiralabs win CPhI Innovation Award

UK companies C3 Technology and Chiralabs won the Gold Award for Innovation at CPhI 2005 for their CrystalGEM predictive crystallisation technology.

Unlike other computational models, which have attempted to predict crystallisation from the molecular level, the structurally driven CrystalGEM technology developed by Chiralabs is based on the analysis of thousands of real crystallisation systems using single or mixed combinations of more than 80 commercially available solvents, coupled to proven and proprietary pattern recognition algorithms. It predicts solubilities and gives an indication of the crystallisation outcomes in mixed solvent conditions, including morphological and polymorphic proclivity.

The approach rapidly highlights areas of solvent space that have the highest chance of delivering viable crystalline material, and are thus suitable for scale-up and manufacture. When coupled to in-house microcrystallisation technology, compounds can be efficiently screened, often generating high quality single crystals suitable for further crystallographic analysis and absolute polymorph confirmation. A full CrystalGEM study including the microcrystallisation screen also requires only around 100mg of compound.

In the first year of marketing, C3 and Chiralabs have secured several new international pharmaceutical clients and the business is set to grow substantially in 2006.

Dr Axel Pleschke, of the Fine Chemicals Business Unit of Lanxess Deutschland, took second place with his paper 'Fluorination of chiral compounds at technical scale'. Pleschke reported on the work being done in the fluorination of chiral hydroxy compounds for intermediates and active ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry.

Novasep Process took third place with its presentation on advances in supercritical fluid chromatographic separation technology. Preparative SFC uses pressurised CO2 instead of organic solvents as a separation eluent. Compared with traditional preparative HPLC, it provides enhanced throughput. It is particularly interesting for the separation of chiral compounds, and the purification of actives or intermediates.