Growth of Equally-Sized Insulin Crystals

TL;DR

This paper develops and tests a theoretical model for growing uniformly-sized insulin crystals, emphasizing control over nucleation and growth processes to achieve consistent crystal size.

Contribution

It introduces a simple matter-balance model for predicting insulin crystal size evolution and demonstrates experimental validation with controlled nucleation and growth.

Findings

The model accurately predicts crystal size over time.

Experimental control achieves uniform insulin crystal sizes.

Nucleation process can be decoupled from growth for better control.

Abstract

Guidelines for growing insulin crystals of a uniform size are formulated and tested experimentally. A simple theoretical model based on the balance of matter predicts the time evolution of the crystal size and supersaturation. The time dependence of the size is checked experimentally. The experimental approach decouples crystal nucleation and growth processes according to the classical nucleation-growth-separation principle. Strict control over the nucleation process is exerted. Crystalline substance dispersity is predetermined during the nucleation stage of a batch crystallization process. To avert nutrition competition during the crystal growth stage, the number density of nucleated crystals is preset to be optimal.