Fast LC Enantiomeric Separation Using Chiral Mobile Phase Additives for Pharmaceutical Applications

The development of fast and efficient analytical methods using high performance liquid chromatography has attracted intense interest in the pharmaceutical industry. Particularly,
much of the interest has been focused on the implementation of ultra high pressure LC with small particles (e.g. sub-2-micron), which provides significant improvement in efficiency while shortening the analysis time. Currently, with the commercially available ultra high performance liquid chromatography instrumentation, the run time of high performance liquid chromatography can be reduced to two minutes and even shorter. However, the separation and analysis of chiral molecules using high performance liquid chromatography in the drug development process has not yet caught up with the speed of the advancement in instrumentation, owing to the lack of chiral stationary phases that can correlate with ultra high performance liquid chromatography systems. Enantiomeric separation and analysis plays an increasingly important role in the pharmaceutical industry, due to large amount of drug molecules and intermediates which involve enantiomers. Thus it will be of great interest to take advantage of ultra high performance liquid chromatography and small particles to develop fast and efficient enantiomeric separation methods. Enantiomeric separation by adding a chiral mobile phase additive in an achiral column provides the possibility
to combine the advantages of ultra high performance liquid chromatography systems and columns packed with small particles. To this aim, this paper is focused on the technique of chiral mobile phase additives used in conjunction with ultra high performance liquid chromatography to achieve fast enantiomeric separation for pharmaceutical applications.