How to pronounce “rito” in English

- Ritonavir is arguably the most dramatic case of what we now call a disappearing polymorph.

Ritonavir was one of the red flags that caused a lot of regulatory activity

It's called ritonavir, and it turned a certain death into a manageable condition.

They had been making ritonavir for two years.

They start ritonavir production there, and to their relief, all the pills passed the dissolution test.

It was still ritonavir, even if it looked a bit different.

But with ritonavir, the situation is a little different.

Abbott needs to halt all production of ritonavir immediately.

So what was happening inside those ritonavir capsules?

They knew that the spectrum of ritonavir should look like this.

effectively seeding them so that when new ritonavir was synthesized, it contained these seed crystals and turned the entire capsules into Form II.

The paste had all the same bonds as ritonavir, so it must be ritonavir.

And that's also exactly what happened with ritonavir.

We certainly know a lot more than we did when ritonavir occurred, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen again.

So naturally the scientists at Abbott suspected something similar might be happening to ritonavir.

The needles they had seen under the microscope were a new polymorph of ritonavir, and a more stable one at that.

So you might expect that Abbott could just do something similar with ritonavir.

This might have created a new crystal similar in shape to Form II ritonavir, which acted like a seed.

They need a control to compare the needles against, so they make some of their own ritonavir in the lab, but to their horror, it also comes out cloudy.

Sometime during this summer, the semi-solid formulation of ritonavir began to change into a crystal form, a transformation that we believed

- In fact, nowadays we know there are not two forms of ritonavir, but at least five.

In the end, there was no way of getting Form I ritonavir back successfully.

They appeared to be an entirely new compound, but when they tested them, everything indicated they were ritonavir.