Freeze-Induced Phase Transition and Local Pressure in a Phospholipid/Water System: Novel Insights Were Obtained from a Time/Temperature Resolved Synchrotron X-ray Diffraction Study

[Image: see text] Water-to-ice transformation results in a 10% increase in volume, which can have a significant impact on biopharmaceuticals during freeze–thaw cycles due to the mechanical stresses imparted by the growing ice crystals. Whether these stresses would contribute to the destabilization of biopharmaceuticals depends on both the magnitude of the stress and sensitivity of a particular system to pressure and sheer stresses. To address the gap of the “magnitude” question, a phospholipid, 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine (DPPC), is evaluated as a probe to detect and quantify the freeze-induced pressure. DPPC can form several phases under elevated pressure, and therefore, the detection of a high-pressure DPPC phase during freezing would be indicative of a freeze-induced pressure increase. In this study, the phase behavior of DPPC/water suspensions, which also contain the ice nucleation agent silver iodide, is monitored by synchrotron small/wide-angle X-ray scattering during the freeze–thaw transition. Cooling the suspensions leads to heterogeneous ice nucleation at approximately −7 °C, followed by a phase transition of DPPC between −11 and −40 °C. In this temperature range, the initial gel phase of DPPC, Lβ′, gradually converts to a second phase, tentatively identified as a high-pressure Gel III phase. The Lβ′-to-Gel III phase transition continues during an isothermal hold at −40 °C; a second (homogeneous) ice nucleation event of water confined in the interlamellar space is detected by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) at the same temperature. The extent of the phase transition depends on the DPPC concentration, with a lower DPPC concentration (and therefore a higher ice fraction), resulting in a higher degree of Lβ′-to-Gel III conversion. By comparing the data from this study with the literature data on the pressure/temperature Lβ′/Gel III phase boundary and the lamellar lattice constant of the Lβ′ phase, the freeze-induced pressure is estimated to be approximately 0.2–2.6 kbar. The study introduces DPPC as a probe to detect a pressure increase during freezing, therefore addressing the gap between a theoretical possibility of protein destabilization by freeze-induced pressure and the current lack of methods to detect freeze-induced pressure. In addition, the observation of a freeze-induced phase transition in a phospholipid can improve the mechanistic understanding of factors that could disrupt the structure of lipid-based biopharmaceuticals, such as liposomes and mRNA vaccines, during freezing and thawing.