Executive Summary : | Pharmaceutical drugs are often administered as solid tablets due to their convenience, compactness, and stability. The manufacturing process of these tablets involves solid-state processing stages like milling, grinding, granulation, and compression. Mechanical properties like elastic modulus, hardness, and brittleness are crucial for the success of these processes. However, understanding the influence of these properties on structure-mechanical property correlations is difficult due to a lack of thorough understanding. Designing new pharmaceutical solids with improved mechanical properties is difficult, especially in drug development and delivery. Crystal engineering has been used to solve issues like solubility, stability, dissolution rate, permeability, hygroscopicity, and bioavailability in API pharmaceuticals. However, there is a lack of adequate theoretical understanding of the structure-mechanical properties correlation, making it difficult to solve tableting problems through crystal engineering. This project aims to develop a robust method for designing the mechanical properties of API through crystal engineering strategy. This strategy will introduce slip planes into pharmaceutical solids with poor mechanical properties, resulting in irreversible plastic deformation. The project will also design new multicomponent solids with pharmaceutically acceptable co-formers, promoting the formation of slip planes in co-crystals. The structure-property correlation of pharmaceutical solids will be established using three-point bending, nanomechanical, and computational techniques. Other physicochemical properties, such as solubility, dissolution, and stability, will also be investigated to address intellectual and physical property issues in drug development and delivery. |