Microwave Radiation Provides Faster, Greener Way to Manufacture Drugs

An interesting discovery made by researchers at the University of Bradford provides a greener and faster technique to manufacture drugs.  

According to the study, published in the journal CrystEngComm, microwave radiation helps in providing a faster and greener way to manufacture drugs. This is the first study of its kind which depicts that microwave radiation can be used efficiently for co-crystallisation, which is a process that creates a single crystal from two compounds.

According to the researchers, drugs that are manufactured from 'co crystals' contain advanced properties of longer shelf life, easy absorption into patient's bloodstream, and enhanced solubility.

In this study, the researchers used caffeine and maleic acid as example compounds and attained 100 percent crystallization within a minute with the use of very little solvents. This made the process of manufacturing the drug faster, and at the same time, environmentally friendly when compared to other conventional techniques.

"We chose caffeine and maleic acid as these compounds have different levels of solubility which is a common problem in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Conventional methods of co-crystallisation aren't effective when you're working with two compounds that dissolve differently, but we found that by using microwave radiation we could still get excellent results," professor Paradkar, Director of the University of Bradford's Centre for Pharmaceutical Engineering, said in a press statement.

Out of the five various solvents used in the study, researchers noticed that methanol and water generated the finest results, as these two solvents were able to pass on heat from microwave radiation more effectively when compared to the other solvents i.e., acetone, ethyl acetate and toluene.

The researchers believe that these experiments, which, till date, have been carried out on a laboratory scale, can offer considerable benefits to the pharmaceutical industry if the process is scaled up. Through this study, they highlight the fact that microwave radiation offers to be a promising substitute for producing pure co crystals faster, with the use of limited solvents.