Pharmaceutical Cocrystals: A Novel Systematic Approach for the Administration of Existing Drugs in New Crystalline Form

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Poor physicochemical properties like solubility, dissolution profile, stability, etc. of drugs remain as an obstacle to formulation development. In the last two decades, pharmaceutical cocrystal gaining lots of interest from researchers as these physicochemical, mechanical, and pharmacokinetic properties can be altered without compromising the therapeutic effect. The multi-component systems wherein one component is essentially the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient and another may be either one more drug or coformer are termed as pharmaceutical cocrystal. Cocrystal is a novel, promising, and emerging approach to encountering such problems and improving the performance of pharmaceuticals. The present article describes the types, rationale of design, synthesis methods, and characterization of pharmaceutical cocrystals. In addition to this, challenges before and after synthesizing cocrystal along with currently approved formulations based on the pharmaceutical cocrystal approach and cocrystals under clinical investigation are highlighted.