Monitoring temporal evolution of the dehydration process of the caffeine hydrate with terahertz spectroscopy

초록

Drugs or foods in various forms, such as hydrate and anhydrous forms, can affect the different therapeutic effect, which is crucial to identify pseudo-polymorphic state. Caffeine, taken in various routes such as coffee, energy drinks, and drugs, has different characteristics in the form of caffeine hydrate or anhydrous caffeine. Here, we investigate a dehydration process of caffeine hydrate by monitoring temporal evolution of terahertz absorption spectra under various exposure times in ambient. It was observed that the main absorption peak of caffeine hydrate at 2.3 THz moves to 1.3 THz indicating anhydrous caffeine during the dehydration process. Moreover, we represent the dehydration process with a simple parameter by extracting the ratio between the absorption values at 2.3 THz and 1.3 THz corresponding to the main absorption resonances of caffeine hydrate and anhydrous caffeine, respectively. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of terahertz spectroscopy technique to monitor dehydration in real time during the manufacturing process in pharmaceutical or biological industries.

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