Chiral single enantiomer sales

The importance of this mode of separation lies in the shear scale of the market for optically pure molecules. The sales of single enantiomer chiral drugs is currently U 180 billion per annum and —65% of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) currently in development have at least one chiral centre. Apart... 

Sales of single enantiomer drugs exceeded 159 billion in 2002. Some of these come from biological sources, but the majority are synthetic. For this reason, the development of synthetic methods that produce only a single enantiomer of chiral compounds is a very active research area in both academic and pharmaceutical research labs. Chiral or asymmetric syntheses, which produce only the desired enantiomer, are much preferred over resolution processes, in which at least half of the initial compound is discarded. 

In the mid-1980s researchers in the pharmaceutical industry demonstrated that single enantiomers of pharmaceutical compounds often functioned better as therapeutic agents than racemic mixtures. There are many examples for which one particular chiral form (enantiomer) of a compound demonstrated therapeutic efficacy, while the other chiral form was ineffective or produced deleterious effects. (For example, dextro-methorpan is commonly used as a cough suppressant, while its enantiomer, levomethorphan, is a powerful narcotic.) By 2002 annual sales of the top 10 singleenantiomer drugs totaled 34.2 billion. ... 

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