Crystal defects creation in Mannitol@CaCl2 metal-organic framework by induced dehydration strategy for enhanced excipient mechanical properties

The mechanical properties of solid pharmaceutical excipients are important for assisting drug tables production, and they determine the quality of the drug tablets. The purpose of this study was to explore the potential and mechanism of crystal defect engineering to improve the mechanical properties of Mannitol@CaCl2 MOF, a pharmaceutical excipient with metal-organic framework (MOF) structure designed and prepared in our previous study. In this study, a simple and efficient "induced dehydration strategy" was proposed to prepare Mannitol@CaCl2 MOF with crystal defects (DEMOF). SEM, TEM, HRTEM, PXRD, FTIR, DSC-TGA, and N2 adsorption-desorption isotherm revealed the successful introduction of lattice vacancy and macrostructural defects while preserving MOF's skeleton structure. Tabletability profiles indicated that DEMOF presented much better mechanical properties than the original MOF at the powder level. On single crystal and atomic scales, nanoindentation and DFT calculations revealed that the defect structure increased plasticity, decreased brittleness, and improved compressibility, resulting in DEMOF tablets with much higher tensile strength that met the criteria for direct compression excipients. The achieved performance modification illustrated the capability of defect engineering to tune mechanical properties of MOFs, and the Mannitol@CaCl2 DEMOF exhibited great potential to serve as a new direct compression pharmaceutical excipient.

The dehydration process in the DL-phenylglycinium trifluoromethanesulfonate monohydrate crystal revealed by XRD, vibrational and DSC studies

Thermal analysis, X-ray diffraction and temperature-dependent IR spectroscopy were used to study the dehydration process of crystalline DL-phenylglycinium trifluoromethanesulfonate monohydrate (PGTFH), C₈H₁₀NO₂⁺·CF₃SO₃^-·H₂O. PGTFH dehydrates in one step centred at 353 K and crystallizes in the monoclinic space group C2/c, whereas the anhydrous compound (PGTF) crystallizes in the triclinic space group P-1. The dehydration process in PGTFH is preceded by a weakening of both the noncovalent aromatic-aromatic interactions and the packing contacts. This process is accompanied by the breakage of medium-strength O-H...O hydrogen bonds between ions inside layers and a reorganization of the ions within the layers. This reorganization results in the formation of two different ion pairs (DL-phenylglycinium trifluoromethanesulfonate) and the formation of a new hydrogen-bond network. The dehydration process does not destroy the nature of the crystal structure. Both crystals, i.e. hydrated and anhydrous, have a layered structure, although the layers of each crystal are arranged somewhat differently.

Computational Dehydration of Crystalline Hydrates Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have evolved to an increasingly reliable and accessible technique and are today implemented in many areas of biomedical sciences. We present a generally applicable method to study dehydration of hydrates based on MD simulations and apply this approach to the dehydration of ampicillin trihydrate. The crystallographic unit cell of the trihydrate is used to construct the simulation cell containing 216 ampicillin and 648 water molecules. This system is dehydrated by removing water molecules during a 2200 ps simulation, and depending on the computational dehydration rate, different dehydrated structures were observed. Removing all water molecules immediately and removing water relatively fast (10 water molecules/10 ps) resulted in an amorphous system, whereas relatively slow computational dehydration (3 water molecules/10 ps) resulted in a crystalline anhydrate. The structural changes could be followed in real time, and in addition, an intermediate amorphous phase was identified. The computationally identified dehydrated structure (anhydrate) was slightly different from the experimentally known anhydrate structure suggesting that the simulated computational structure could represent a kinetically trapped dehydration intermediate.