Risperidone – Solid-state characterization and pharmaceutical compatibility using thermal and non-thermal techniques

• DSC was used to characterize Risperidone and study its compatibility with excipients.
• FT-IR associated with PCA was used to complement DSC data.
• LC analyzes confirmed the DSC and FT-IR/PCA results.
• Risperidone was incompatible with three among five excipients evaluated.

A full solid-state characterization of risperidone was conducted using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogravimetry (TG), powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to examine its physicochemical properties and polymorphism. The primary aim of this work was to study the compatibility of risperidone with pharmaceutical excipients using DSC to obtain and compare the curves of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and the excipients with their 1:1 (w/w) binary mixtures. These same binary mixtures were turned to room temperature and analyzed by FT-IR combined with principal component analysis (PCA) to evaluate solid-state incompatibilities. The chemical incompatibilities of these samples were verified using a stability-indicating liquid chromatography (LC) method to assay for the API and evaluate the formation of degradation products. All of these methods showed incompatibilities between risperidone and the excipients magnesium stearate, lactose and cellulose microcrystalline.