Adam O'Neil received his PhD for work in supercritical fluid processing from the University of Notingham, England in 2003. He then moved to the US and took up a postdoc in metal and metal oxide film deposition at the University of Massachuestts, Amherst. In 2007 he move to Boston to the Materials Discovery and Characterization group at Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. His current work involves solid form identification and selection with an emphasis towards enabling rapid scaleup.

Professor Chris Frampton obtained his BSc in Chemistry and his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Essex in 1981 and 1985 respectively.

After completion of his PhD research he took up a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Professor Tom Birchall at McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, researching into the correlation of crystal structure data with Mössbauer spectroscopic parameters of highoxidation state main-group compounds. He subsequently took up the management position of the single-crystal X-ray facility at McMaster University.

Professor Frampton holds visiting professorial positions at the University of Southampton and the University of Bristol and is currently a Research Associate of Girton College, Cambridge. He is the author and co-author of over 100 peer-reviewed research publications which have appeared in many high-impact journals.

He has acted as an expert witness in a number of high profile legal cases, involving the solid form of pharmaceutical drug substance, in both the US and the UK Prior to his more recent academic positions, Professor Frampton was Director of Strategic Marketing at Bruker AXS where he was responsible for new technology in the bio-market. He joined Bruker after 9 years at Roche Discovery Welwyn, a UK-based semi-autonomous research and development division of F. Hoffman La-Roche AG, with the primary responsibility for the establishment of a single crystal X-ray diffraction laboratory to support both medicinal chemistry and the pre-clinical Pharmaceutical Development Department. This included participating in research projects that led to the successful market launch of drugs such as the influenza neuraminidase inhibitor Tamiflu® (oseltamivir phosphate) and a first-generation HIV protease inhibitor Invirase® (saquinivir mesylate). More recently he was a Director of CrystallografX Ltd., commercial consultancy and laboratory service to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Cofounder and Director of Pharmorphix Ltd. (July 2003), consultancy and solid-form research services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. He joined Pharmorphix full time in January 2005 as Chief Scientific Officer. Pharmorphix was acquired by SAFC Pharma, A Sigma-Aldrich Company Ltd. in August 2006.

Dr David Berry qualified as a pharmacist from the University of Bradford (UK) in 2004 and worked as a hospital pharmacist for 18 months before returning to Bradford to obtain his PhD in 2009. The focus of his research was on the design, discovery and behaviour of co-crystals. Since the completion of his PhD he has worked in early development (solid state) for AstraZeneca (Macclesfield).

From 2001 to 2006, Jerome Menegotto held the position of scientist in the Analytical Development Department of Sanofi aventis at Toulouse, France. He was responsible for dielectric characterization of amorphous and crystalline phases of active ingredients and pharmaceutical products in development in Sanofi aventis. Since 2006, Jerome holds the position of head of the Solid State Laboratory of the Discovery Analytics department of Sanofi aventis at Toulouse, France. He is in charge of Salt Screening, Solvent Screening, Chiral Screening, Co-Crystal Screening and salt characterization studies and more generally of Solid State characterization of drug substance at earliest stage of development. In transversal organization, Jerome is a leader in the Salt Selection process in Sanofi aventis.

Jerome obtained his BA and his Master degree in Physics in 1994 and 1995 respectively and received his Ph.D in 1999 from the P. Sabatier University of Toulouse in Polymer Physics. From 1999 to 2001, he holds a Post-doc position in Polymer Physics at the P. Sabatier University of Toulouse. His research interests include amorphous dynamics and stabilization through solid solutions, crystallization in liquid and solid state and salts, polymorphs, co-crystal, chiral screening and characterization. His skills are Dielectric Spectroscopies, Thermal analyses (DSC-MDSC, TGA), Microscopy, Hygroscopicity measurement, X-ray powder diffraction (including high throughput XRPD), Particle size distribution, Infrared spectroscopy and microscopy, Raman microscopy, Development of Robotic methods.

Communications:

• 2 patents,
• 3 book chapters
• 11 publications with reviewer committee

Mark Oliveira is currently at Alkermes, Inc.(Waltham, MA) in the Pharmaceutical Chemistry group continuing efforts to explore crystal form diversity. He received his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering in 2000 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and his Master’s in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002. Afterwards, he joined TransForm Pharmaceuticals (Lexington, MA) in the Pharmaceutical Chemistry group exploring salt, polymorph, and co-crystal formation using various bench top and high throughput techniques until 2007. He recently completed a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science from the University of Manchester, UK (June 2010) studying the thermodynamics of pharmaceutical co-crystals with respect to their enthalpy of formation. His research interests included the comparison of measured and calculated heats of formation, the relative importance of hydrogen bonding and van der Waals interactions to enthalpy contributions, and methods of correlating measured heat of formation values to crystal packing metrics.

Michael-Robin Witt was born in 1960 in Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in 1986 with a MSc. in Biochemistry at Freie Universität Berlin and subsequently engaged in neuropharmacological research at the Research Laboratory of St. Hans Hospital, Roskilde, Denmark. MRW graduated in 1995 with a Ph.D. in neuropharmacology from the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy. In 2000 he was appointed Section Head at the High-Throughput Screening Section, Discovery CNS & Pain, AstraZeneca R&D, Discovery in Södertälje, Sweden. MRW was recruited as Head of Lead Discovery Department at KaroBio AB, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, becoming Principal Scientist in 2006. In 2007, he co-founded Axcentua Pharmaceuticals.

Renato Chiarella is a Senior Process Development Engineer at Alkermes, responsible for the scale up of crystallization and formulation processes. Prior to that he held several positions in Johnson & Johnson and TransForm Pharmaceuticals, leading projects in form discovery and selection, crystallization process development, and early and late stage formulation development. He obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester/UMIST (UK).

Richard Schartman is a physical chemist specializing in pharmaceutics. Dr. Schartman has 14 years of industrial experience in the areas of preformulation, solid form selection, and phase I formulation development. He currently works in a discovery setting at Bristol-Myers Squibb where he is engaged in compound selection for development.

I received my PhD in 2002 on the subject of NMR and biological systems. In the following two years I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. My research interests were the applications of NMR residual dipolar couplings to solve the structure of organic molecules. I researched for another two years at the University of Warwick on advanced solid-state NMR (SSNMR) methodology for the studies of hydrogen bonding in the solid state, which is of vital interest to the pharmaceutical industry since the hydrogen bonds are responsible for many solid-state phenomena and chemico-physical properties of pharmaceuticals such as polymorphism, co-crystals, solubility and stability. In 2006 I joined GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) as a Principal Scientist. My primary works at GSK include the use of SSNMR for the understanding of pharmaceutical solids. I have authored 18 papers and book chapters on the topics of NMR and SSNMR. Relevant papers to my presentation at the Pharma IQ’s Pharmaceutical Co-Crystals Conference 2010 include:

• Frederick G. Vogt, Jacalyn S. Clawson, Mark Strohmeier, Andrew J. Edwards, Tran N. Pham, and Simon A. Watson, “Solid-state NMR Analysis of Organic Cocrystals and Complexes”, Crystal Growth & Design, 9, 921-937 (2009) [dx.doi.org/10.1021/cg8007014]
• Jacalyn S. Clawson, Frederick G. Vogt, Jeffrey Brum, Joseph Sisko, Daniel B. Patience, Wenning Dai, Sonja Sharpe, Alan D Jones, Tran N.Pham, Matthew N. Johnson, and Royston C. P Copley “Formation and Characterization of Crystals Containing a Pleuromutilin Derivative, Succinic Acid and Water” Crystal Growth & Design, 8, 4120-4131 (2008) [dx.doi.org/10.1021/cg8005713]
• Tran N. Pham, Stefan Masiero, Giovanni Gottarelli and Steven P. Brown: “Identification by 15N Refocused INADEQUATE MAS NMR of Intermolecular Hydrogen Bonding that Directs the Self-Assembly of Modified DNA bases” Journal of the American Chemical Society, 127, 16018-16019 (2005). [dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja056188+]
• Jonathan R. Yates, Tran N. Pham, Chris J. Pickard, Francesco Mauri, Ana M. Amado, Ana M. Gil and Steven P. Brown: “An Investigation of Weak CH...O Hydrogen Bonds in Maltose Anomers by a Combination of Calculation and Experimental Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy”. Journal of the American Chemical Society 127, 10216-10220 (2005) [dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja051019a]
• Tran N. Pham, John M. Griffin, Stefano Masiero, Stefano Lena, Giovanni Gottarelli, Paul Hodgkinson, Claudiu Filip and Steven P. Brown “Quantifying hydrogen-bonding strength: the measurement of 2hJNN couplings in self-assembled guanosines by solid-state 15N spin-echo MAS NMR”, Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, 9, 3416-3423 (2007) [dx.doi.org/10.1039/b703513f]
• Giuseppe Pileio, Ying Guo, Tran N. Pham, John M. Griffin, Malcolm H. Levitt, and Steven P. Brown, “Residual Dipolar Couplings by Off-Magic-Angle Spinning in Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 129, 10972 -10973 (2007) [dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja0721115]