Formulation & polymorph screening
The problem
When characterizing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), many compounds can crystallize into different solid forms — or polymorphs — each with their own solubility, bioavailability, and stability profile. Understanding which forms exist, and confirming which one is most stable, is critical for performance, manufacturability, and IP protection.
Finding those forms means screening hundreds of crystallization conditions: solvents, salts, additives, and co-crystals that can shift structure and stability. It’s labor-intensive, often requiring armies of hands and endless plates. Traditional automation might let you run more experiments, but it won’t help you design better ones or understand your data any faster.
The right tool for the job
Stuntman is the adaptable automation platform that takes the pain out of formulation and polymorph screening with built-in AI. Turn your natural-language prompts into executable scripts that can orchestrate closed-loop automation from start to finish. Stuntman AI helps plan and organize experiments, interpret results, and guide how things progress. Design, execute, and analyze experiments all in one place using Stuntman AI, intuitive drag-and-drop interface, or Python with full API access.
Configure your deck your way to automate experimental setup, explore massive condition spaces — discrete or continuous, solvents or co-formers, temperature or concentration — and capture every datapoint as crystallizations unfold. From precise weighing and solvent handling to controlled temperature, mixing, and evaporation, Stuntman runs small-scale screens that reveal more forms and formulations with less material and time.
What’s possible
Powder dispense
Every solid-form discovery needs solids dispensed precisely. Whether it’s an API, excipient, or co-former, the exact amount of each component determines what crystal form you’ll get — and whether you’ll ever get it again. Two hopper formats on Stuntman – Classic and Storage Vial (SV) – cover everything from sub-milligram catalyst charges to gram-scale reagent additions. They handle everything from free-flowing powders to stubborn, chunky solids without breaking a sweat. Load any combo of hoppers on deck and let Stuntman’s adaptive algorithms learn each powder’s flow profile for precise, reproducible delivery.
Classic hoppers (10, 25, 50, 100 mL) nail one-to-many dispenses when the same powder goes into multiple wells. SV hoppers are ideal for massive screens with dozens of unique reagents or materials, using standard 4 mL glass vials with disposable heads. Stack dozens on deck, keep hundreds more off deck, and track every dispense with full traceability. Compact, flexible, and reusable – the perfect setup for high-throughput chemistry.
Liquid dispense
Stuntman has numerous options for transferring liquids. Positive Displacement Tips (PDTs) handle everything from volatile solvents to viscous reagents and slurries, spanning 10 µL to 10 mL. Wide-bore needles keep slurries and suspensions flowing without clogs. Solvents can be drawn from on-deck or off-deck sources, ranging from a few microliters to hundreds of milliliters. Each liquid type is individually calibrated, so every dispense hits the target — no drips, no waste, no surprises. For pH-sensitive salt screens, Stuntman can adjust and monitor pH during solution prep, ensuring the right ionization state before crystallization begins.
The heated, spreadable six-tip head comes into play when you need to keep reagents soluble through temperature-sensitive workflows. The six-tip head runs up to 120 °C. Adjustable spacing from 9–20 mm fits everything from 96-well plates to larger vials, so you can move easily between discovery and development formats. The 6-tip includes an extendable tip if you just need one solution at a time, and the head can be put into 4-tip If you’re handling several.
Heated filtration
Organic solvents can be tricky — volatile, fast-evaporating, and solutions that crystallize or clog when they cool. Stuntman’s heated liquid-dispense tools keep reagents soluble and transfers spotless so every screening starts right.
Crystallization is very sensitive to the presence of a nucleator to initiate crystal formation. Nucleators can lead to very irreproducible results. When crystallizations need to stay particle-free, automating the removal of these solids is accomplished by combining heated dispensing with filtration through a heated filter block that can be added to a Stuntman deck. This sandwich of filters and gaskets is heated up to 120 °C. This seals everything in and prevents evaporation and precipitation when you’re running polymorph screening experiments on this small scale.
Crystallization control
Uniform temperature control and mixing are critical for reproducible crystallization, and Stuntman’s Heat/Cool/Stir Bays give you full control. Each bay provides precise, independent control of temperature, agitation, and evaporation, so you can run multiple crystallization experiments under different conditions – all on a single deck.
Operate bays from below zero to 180 °C for temperature-driven or supersaturation studies. Perform slow-solvent-loss crystallizations right on deck and compare how temperature, agitation, or solvent choice affect crystal formation side by side. If orbital vortexing is your preferred choice of mixing, outfit the deck with a Vortexing Station for consistent, low-shear agitation.
Crystallizations run directly in crystallizer blocks on the Heat/Cool/Stir Bays, so there’s no need to transfer crystals after growth. Each block uses plastic tubes sealed against a glass substrate where crystals form and settle. For controlled growth, Stuntman automates slow anti-solvent addition, managing supersaturation and crystal nucleation. Once complete, simply disassemble the block and move the glass substrate straight to XRD, Raman, or imaging without disrupting the crystals.
Imaging and through-vial Raman
Every crystal tells a story — what form it is, how it grew, and how stable it will be. Stuntman lets you capture that story without ever opening a vial. On-deck visual imaging and integrated Raman probe make it easy to see and identify every crystal that’s formed.
High-resolution imaging tracks each vial individually, capturing clarity and turbidity. Through-vial Raman confirms the solid form directly inside the sealed vial. Together, they deliver a complete picture of what’s happening - which conditions nucleated crystals, which forms appeared, and how those forms evolve over time.
For pH-sensitive systems, Stuntman can capture and correlate pH data alongside imaging and Raman results — linking crystal morphology, structure, and solution conditions into one dataset.
Integrations
With Stuntman, the possibilities are endless . Use Stuntman’s built-in AI or Python API to connect with your own tools, data systems, or AI and machine learning platforms. Drop in modules that your workflow calls for or hook it up with third-party systems. Keep expanding as your workflows evolve.
Stuntman
Stuntman has natural-language AI embedded directly into the system to help plan and design smarter experiments, close the loop faster, and adapt as conditions change, while hardware is configured upfront to fit your workflow. The result is faster iteration, more informative data, and automation that finally keeps pace with real science, whether you’re working in chemistry, biologics, materials, or beyond.
Want more info?
Every lab has different bottlenecks and challenges. We’re all about partnering with you to build the bespoke solution that lets you do science faster and better. Have questions or can’t wait to speak with our expert team to find out what might be possible?