Antipas GSE, Reul R, Voges K, Kyeremateng SO, Ntallis NA, Karalis KT, Miroslaw L. System-agnostic prediction of pharmaceutical excipient miscibility via computing-as-a-service and experimental validation.
Sci Rep 2024;
14:15106. [PMID:
38956156 PMCID:
PMC11219749 DOI:
10.1038/s41598-024-65978-2]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/29/2024] [Accepted: 06/26/2024] [Indexed: 07/04/2024] Open
Abstract
We applied computing-as-a-service to the unattended system-agnostic miscibility prediction of the pharmaceutical surfactants, Vitamin E TPGS and Tween 80, with Copovidone VA64 polymer at temperature relevant for the pharmaceutical hot melt extrusion process. The computations were performed in lieu of running exhaustive hot melt extrusion experiments to identify surfactant-polymer miscibility limits. The computing scheme involved a massively parallelized architecture for molecular dynamics and free energy perturbation from which binodal, spinodal, and mechanical mixture critical points were detected on molar Gibbs free energy profiles at 180 °C. We established tight agreement between the computed stability (miscibility) limits of 9.0 and 10.0 wt% vs. the experimental 7 and 9 wt% for the Vitamin E TPGS and Tween 80 systems, respectively, and identified different destabilizing mechanisms applicable to each system. This paradigm supports that computational stability prediction may serve as a physically meaningful, resource-efficient, and operationally sensible digital twin to experimental screening tests of pharmaceutical systems. This approach is also relevant to amorphous solid dispersion drug delivery systems, as it can identify critical stability points of active pharmaceutical ingredient/excipient mixtures.
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