Use of glass transitions in carbohydrate excipient design for lyophilized protein formulations

This work describes an effort to apply methods from process systems engineering to a pharmaceutical product design problem, with a novel application of statistical approaches to comparing solutions. A computational molecular design framework was employed to design carbohydrate molecules with high glass transition temperatures and low water content in the maximally freeze-concentrated matrix, with the objective of stabilizing lyophilized protein formulations. Quantitative structure-property relationships were developed for glass transition temperature of the anhydrous solute, glass transition temperature of the maximally concentrated solute, melting point of ice and Gordon-Taylor constant for carbohydrates. An optimization problem was formulated to design an excipient with optimal property values. Use of a stochastic optimization algorithm, Tabu search, provided several carbohydrate excipient candidates with statistically similar property values, as indicated by prediction intervals calculated for each property.