The National Institutes of Health have awarded DeNovX a Phase I SBIR grant of $311,500 to apply its innovative, patented crystallization technologies to the discovery and characterization of co-crystalline materials. Co-crystals are a combination of two or more different compounds (i.e., the “co-“) that crystallize individually into a single crystalline material (i.e., the “crystal”). This definition is evolving and remains a bit cumbersome, but the applications of co-crystalline materials are exciting and broad, with several co-crystalline pharmaceuticals already approved for use. The promise of co-crystals lay in

the enormity of the molecular combinations that can be engineered to give crystalline materials with widely varying physical properties. With approximately 70% of newly developed active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) exhibiting poor water solubility that can adversely affect bioavailabilty, co-crystals offer a unique approach to solving these and other problems in API development. DeNovX will apply its patented crystal nucleation technologies in a unified workflow that will improve the probability and speed of co-crystal formation and discovery in high throughput screening. These applications with co-crystals complement DeNovX’s prior studies that have demonstrated improved crystallization outcomes for small molecule APIs and for proteins in support of structure-based drug design.