WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., March 3, 2025 – A new high-tech startup, Crystallization Systems Technology Inc. (CrySyst), has been launched by experts in international process systems and operations. The company aims to streamline the processes employed by businesses within the pharmaceutical and fine chemical sectors.
CrySyst’s approach centers around its quality-by-control (QbC) framework. This framework directly addresses the monitoring, modeling, and control of crystallization processes.
The core technology behind CrySyst stems from research published in the Crystal Growth & Design journal (April 15, 2020, and October 5, 2021, issues) and the Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research journal (September 22, 2022, issue).
CrySyst was co-founded by Zoltán Nagy, the Arvind Varma Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, and Botond Szilágyi, who previously served as a postdoctoral research associate at Purdue and is currently an associate professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
The Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization has granted CrySyst a license to commercialize the copyrighted technologies known as CryMoCo and CrySiV. These software solutions are designed to address key challenges in process development.
“The most significant hurdles in model-based process development involve determining the necessary experiments, selecting appropriate model structures, and obtaining reliable model parameters,” Nagy explained.
“CrySyst’s tools directly address these pain points by providing guided experiment selection, offering a semiautomated framework for model development, and delivering reliable, high-confidence solutions,” he added.
Nagy emphasized that CrySiV and CryMoCo offer a streamlined, systematic, and scientifically sound method for developing crystallization processes.
“These tools reduce time, material use, and risk, while improving process robustness and scalability,” he stated.
CryMoCo is a software solution for crystallization process monitoring and control that works with any instrument vendor. It incorporates industry-standard communication protocols with common process analytical technology tools and state-of-the-art process control methods, including direct nucleation and supersaturation control strategies.
“This allows for the rapid design of robust crystallization processes using our innovative QbC framework,” Nagy said.
CrySiV is a user-friendly, interactive simulator for crystallization based on population balance modeling. It supports the digital design of crystallization processes and offers kinetic parameter regression, process simulation, and visualization capabilities.
“CrySiV also features process optimization tools for both crystallization and integrated crystallization-wet milling processes, employing cutting-edge numerical methods for both modeling and optimization,” Nagy noted.
According to Nagy, CryMoCo and CrySiV provide:
- An intuitive and user-friendly interface, minimizing the learning curve for industry professionals.
- Cutting-edge numerical solvers, guaranteeing robust, reproducible results that also enable rigorous model validation.
- A structured workflow, guiding users through model selection and refinement while minimizing computational uncertainties.
Pharmaceutical and fine chemical companies often face process development challenges due to limited material availability, constraints on experimental resources, and the extensive timelines required for optimization solely through experiments.
“These challenges can be effectively addressed through model-based digital design and model-free direct design approaches, which have seen increasing adoption,” Nagy said. “However, to achieve widespread implementation, there is a critical need for systematic workflows and robust tools to support their integration into industrial practice. This is what CrySyst solutions address. We are committed to helping our clients develop and scale their process technologies faster, using less material. We offer specialized software products for model-free and model-based crystallization process design as well as consultancy and training services for problem-solving with our software tools.”
Nagy and Szilágyi received funding from the Enabling Technologies Consortium. The consortium included several major pharmaceutical firms.
“We collaborated on a project with them for three years, and through close interaction with the crystallization scientists from the member companies, we developed the tools based on feedback we received to fit the needs of the industry,” Nagy said.
About Crystallization Systems Technology
Crystallization Systems Technology is devoted to assisting the pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries in accelerating the development and scale-up of their process technologies. This is achieved by using advanced crystallization monitoring, modeling, and control solutions. The company offers specialized software solutions for both model-free and model-based crystallization process design, in addition to consulting and training services geared toward problem-solving via their software tools.
About Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization
The Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs amongst prominent research universities within the U.S. This office provides services that support Purdue University’s economic development efforts. They also benefit the university’s academic activities by commercializing, licensing, and protecting Purdue’s intellectual property.
In fiscal year 2024, the office reported completing 145 agreements involving 224 technologies, receiving 466 invention disclosures, and securing 290 U.S. and international patents.
The office is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, which is a private, non-profit foundation established to advance the mission of Purdue University.
For more information, please contact otcip@prf.org.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a leading public research university that strives for excellence at scale. Ranked among the top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue excels at discovering, disseminating, and deploying knowledge to an outstanding degree and scale. More than 107,000 students are enrolled at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations, and modalities, with over 58,000 students at its main campus in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has kept tuition frozen for 13 consecutive years.
Discover how Purdue is always striving for the next giant leap – through its comprehensive urban expansion, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes, and the One Health initiative – at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives
