15 Years of Cross-Pharma Consortium Delivering Materials Development Tools
- CCDC celebrates 15 years of collaborations with pharmaceutical companies members of the Crystal Form Consortium (CFC).
- A new white paper on the origins of the CFC and the structural informatics tools developed by the consortium is now available to download: “The Crystal Form Consortium: 15 Years of Industry-led Informatics Innovation”.
- This strong collaboration helps advance the pharmaceutical development of new solid forms.
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) celebrates the 15th year of the Crystal Form Consortium (CFC), a collaboration between development chemists from top pharmaceutical companies and software, database, and research experts at the CCDC.
The CFC was established in 2009, aiming to address the lack of rational design tools for solid form development. Over these 15 years, the members worked together and developed new structural informatics tools to tackle crucial pharmaceutical challenges. These tools enable solid forms to be checked to evaluate risks, including: assessing the risks of polymorphism, evaluating the geometries of the existing interactions, rationalizing aromatic and H-bond interactions. The tools are made available in the CSD-Materials suite of software.
With more than 1.25 million curated experimental crystal structures, the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provides big-data insights for molecular visualization and analysis. By accessing the wealth of structural data and knowledge contained in the CSD, the collection of informatics tools developed by the CFC helps to perform reliable investigations and predictions of the stability of pharmaceutical crystals.
Today the CFC has 12 members, including some of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies, and the CCDC.
The approach used by the CFC is focused on reducing the risks encountered during the development phase of a solid form. Structural informatics tools can aid the decision-making process during a compound’s development, and guide scientists to find the solid form that exhibits the optimal properties, such as stability and bioavailability.
“It has been wonderful to be part of the CFC from its beginnings 15 years ago. Since then we’ve built a vibrant community from a small, but engaged group, and it has been a pleasure getting to know our members.”
“Together the CFC has built the science and principles of solid form informatics and put them into practice in industry. We have developed an extensive software toolbox focused on helping with solid form development, and we couldn’t have achieved any of it without our engaged, and collaborative friends from the pharma industry.” Elna Pidcock, Solid Form Science Team Leader at CCDC.
The CFC members will continue working together to keep advancing the pharmaceutical development and mitigating the risks in solid form selection and development.
Next Steps
Download the new white paper “The Crystal Form Consortium: 15 Years of Industry-led Informatics Innovation”.
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