Achiral assay methods

Determination of the drug substance is expected to be enantioselective, and this may be achieved by including a chiral assay in the specification or an achiral assay together with appropriate methods of controlling the enantiomeric impurity. For a drug product where racemization does not occur during manufacture or storage, an achiral assay may suffice. If racemization does happen, then a chiral assay should be used or an achiral method combined with a validated procedure to control the presence of the other enantiomer. 

Chiral or achiral assay and purity determinations are done according to an external calibration calculation procedure, either with or without internal standardization. The calibration is performed against a 10% w/w (compared to the nominal concentration of the sample solution at 100% w/w) reference standard solution. The sample solution for the purity determination remains at the 100% w/w level, while that of the assay determination is diluted 10 times. The reason for the difference in concentration levels is similar to the purity method. A suggested sample injection sequence can be... 

Already it is evident that the requirements placed upon validation of a chiral LC-MS method are appreciably more demanding than those for an achiral assay, for... 

Enantiomeric pnrity assays have also been performed without chromatographic separation being conducted prior to detection, for example, with circular dichroism (CD) and MS. Bertncci et al. [110] developed a chiral assay for pulegone, oxazepam, and warfarin by combining simnltaneons UV, CD, and g factor detection on an achiral separation system with a Hypersil CN colnmn and a mobile phase of hexane 2-PrOH (90 10). The precision (RSD%) of the method ranged from 0.6% to 2.6%, and the LOQs were between 0.1% and 1% (0.2-2.2 j,g). For fnrther information concerning the application of CD and polarometric detection for chiral detection, see the review by Bobbitt and Linder [111]. 

Counter-ions, usually small polar or ionic compounds, are routinely used to enhance the aqueous solubility and/or stability of the API. Because of their polarity, counter-ions are rarely resolved from the chromatographic solvent front in reversed-phase HPLC and have characteristically poor chromophores which makes detection difficult. The counter-ion can be omitted from the achiral method development sample set with minimal risk when this holds true. Analysis of counter-ions is normally performed using ion chromatography.9,10 This assay is separate from the reversed-phase assay performed to measure organic impurity levels. 

The sample should be as pure as possible, but standards have been used where the major constituent is approximately 85% of the mixture, as long as the remainder is made up of known compounds. Suggestions to use mixtures as reference standards have been made to reduce the number of assays run and the number of samples handled. This is clearly the case for a racemic mixture in an achiral HPLC assay, where both enantiomers have the same retention and detector response. It can also be beneficial to use known mixtures of diastereomers as a standard, provided there is sound reasoning that they give equivalent response to the method of detection. 

Use of chiral detection for achiral liquid chromatographic separations has been reported in hterature using CD detectors and the g-factor. These experiments have shown methods for the simultaneous determination of assay... 

---