This short review presents and highlights the work performed by the Lisbon Group on the mechanochemical synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) multicomponent compounds. Here, we show some of our most relevant contributions on the synthesis of supramolecular derivatives of well-known commercial used drugs and the corresponding improvement on their physicochemical properties. The study reflects, not only our pursuit of using crystal engineering principles for the search of supramolecular entities, but also our aim to correlate them with the desired properties. The work also covers our results on polymorphic screening and describes our proposed alternatives to induce and maintain specific polymorphic forms, and our approach to avoid polymorphism using APIs as ionic liquids. We want to stress that all the work was performed using mechanochemistry, a green advantageous synthetic technique.
Keywords: active pharmaceutical ingredient; cocrystals; mechanochemistry; molecular salts; supramolecular interactions.