Drug Development Applications of Raman Spectroscopy

industry is the need to identify and characterise all of the various physical forms of potential drug candidates. Most chemical compounds exist both in amorphic and multiple crystalline forms. The different crystal forms are also known as polymorphs. Polymorphism describes the solid state phenomenon where crystalline materials of the same chemical composition adopt more than one stable or meta-stable crystal structure. This issue is of importance for a number of reasons. First, because different polymorphs exhibit differences in pharmacologically relevant properties – such as bioavailability, dissolution and stability. Second, polymorph differences are also important to drug manufacturability and processing. Finally, since each polymorph is legally defined as a unique, patentable composition of matter, pharmaceutical companies need to perform exhaustive compound screening in order to identify and protect all possible forms.