The long-term stability of an active-pharmaceutical ingredient
and its drug products plays an important role in the licensing process
of new pharmaceuticals and for the application of the drug at the
patient. It is, however, difficult to predict degradation profiles
at early stages of the development of new drugs, making the entire
process very time-consuming and costly. Forced mechanochemical degradation
under controlled conditions can be used to realistically model long-term
degradation processes naturally occurring in drug products, avoiding
the use of solvents, thus excluding irrelevant solution-based degradation
pathways. We present the forced mechanochemical oxidative degradation
of three platelet inhibitor drug products, where the drug products
contain thienopyridine. Model studies using clopidogrel hydrogen sulfate
(CLP) and its drug formulation Plavix show that the controlled
addition of excipients does not affect the nature of the main degradants.
Experiments using drug products Ticlopidin-neuraxpharm and Efient
show that significant degradation occurs after short reaction times
of only 15 min. These results highlight the potential of mechanochemistry
for the study of degradation processes of small molecules relevant
to the prediction of degradation profiles during the development of
new drugs. Furthermore, these data provide exciting insights into
the role of mechanochemistry for chemical synthesis in general.