The Application of Computational Modeling to Pharmaceutical Materials Science

Computational modeling is a ubiquitous technique in materials science, but until recently this approach has not been widely applied to the drug development process. The formation of particles, their kinematics, and their response to processing stresses are increasingly being studied using computational techniques (computational fluid dynamics and discrete element analysis). These computational techniques can be predictive tools to guide scientists who are designing pharmaceutical dosage forms with specific macroscopic properties. This article gives an overview of the types of computational methods that are used in pharmaceutical materials science and provides examples of their application to some problems from the literature and the authors' own work.