Combining the Advantages of Powder X‐ray Diffraction and NMR Crystallography in Structure Determination of the Pharmaceutical Material Cimetidine Hydrochloride

We report the crystal structure of the anhydrous phase of cimetidine hydrochloride, determined directly from powder X-ray diffraction data. The material was prepared by dehydration of the readily obtained monohydrate form of cimetidine hydrochloride, the only form for which a crystal structure has previously been reported. As such, solid-state dehydration processes typically yield the product phase as a microcrystalline powder, and structure determination was carried out directly from powder X-ray diffraction data, using the direct-space genetic algorithm technique for structure solution followed by Rietveld refinement. The structure determined from powder X-ray diffraction was further validated by calculating solid-state C NMR data for the crystal structure (using first-principles periodic DFT techniques within the GIPAW approach) and assessing the quality of agreement with the corresponding experimental solid-state C CPMAS NMR data. This strategy provides a robust vindication of the correctness of the crystal structure by assessing the quality of agreement of the structure both with experimental powder X-ray diffraction data and with experimental solid-state C NMR data.