Solubility Advantage of Amorphous Drugs and Pharmaceutical Cocrystals

The current phase of drug development is witnessing an oncoming crisis due to the combined effects of increasing R&D costs, decreasing number of new drug molecules being launched, several blockbuster drugs falling off the patent cliff, and a high proportion of advanced drug candidates exhibiting poor aqueous solubility. The traditional approach of salt formulation to improve drug solubility is unsuccessful with molecules that lack ionizable functional groups, have sensitive moieties that are prone to decomposition/racemization, and/or are not sufficiently acidic/basic to enable salt formation. Several novel examples of pharmaceutical cocrystals from the past decade are reviewed, and the enhanced solubility profiles of cocrystals are analyzed. The peak dissolution for pharmaceutical cocrystals occurs in a short time (<30 min), and high solubility is maintained over a sufficiently long period (4–6 h) for the best cases. The enhanced solubility of drug cocrystals is similar to the supersaturation phenomenon characteristic of amorphous drugs. However, in contrast to the metastable nature of amorphous phases, cocrystals are stable owing to their crystalline nature. Yet, cocrystals can exhibit dramatic solubility advantage over the stable crystalline drug form, often comparable to amorphous pharmaceuticals. The “spring and parachute” concept for amorphous drug dissolution is adapted to explain the solubility advantage of pharmaceutical cocrystals. Thus (1) the cocrystal dissociates to amorphous or nanocrystalline drug clusters (the spring), which (2) transform via fast dissolving metastable polymorphs to the insoluble crystalline modification following the Ostwald’s Law of Stages, to give (3) high apparent solubility for cocrystals and optimal drug concentration (the parachute) in the aqueous medium.