The role of cocrystals in pharmaceutical science

Pharmaceutical cocrystals, a subset of a long known but little-studied class of compounds, represent an emerging class of crystal forms in the context of pharmaceutical science. They are attractive to pharmaceutical scientists because they can significantly diversify the number of crystal forms that exist for a particular active pharmaceutical ingredient (API), and they can lead to improvements in physical properties of clinical relevance. In this article we address pharmaceutical cocrystals from the perspective of design (crystal engineering) and present a series of case studies that demonstrate how they can enhance the solubility, bioavailability, and/or stability of API crystal forms.