Developmental activities for freeze-dried products are dictated by the limited availability and high cost of newly developed active compounds, and by Quality-by-Design requirements. Laboratory-scale freeze dryers used for formulation and process development show an excessive variety of designs and instrumentation concepts, making scale-up activities a challenge. The development of miniaturised equipment may provide enormous benefits in terms of development times and costs.

A team at the University of Alberta have been using the Linkam Freeze Drying system FDCS to study how intracellular ice formation during cryopreservation of cells is affected by the degree of supercooling and the cell volume, in the absence of cryoprotectants.