Drug molecules, chiral separation

Chirality plays a major role in biological processes and enantiomers of a particular molecule can often have different physiological properties. In some cases, enantiomers may have similar pharmacological properties with different potencies for example, one enantiomer may play a positive pharmacological role, while the other can be toxic. For this reason, advancements in asymmetric synthesis, especially in the pharmaceutical industry and life sciences, has led to the need to assess the enantiomeric purity of drugs. Chromatographic chiral separation plays an important role in this domain. Today, there are a large number of chiral stationary phases on the market that facilitate the assessment of enantiomeric purity. 

The two forms of mirror images are called enantiomers, or stereoisomers. All amino acids in proteins are left-handed, and all sugars in DNA and RNA are right-handed. Drug molecules with chiral centers when synthesized without special separation steps in the reaction process result in 50/50 mixtures of both the left- and right-handed forms. The mixture is often referred to as a racemic mixture. 

Chiral separation of drng molecules and of their precursors, in the case of synthesis of enantiomerically pure drugs, is one of the important application areas of HPLC in pharmaceutical analysis. Besides HPLC, capillary electrophoresis (CE) is another technique of choice for chiral separations. Chapter 18 provides an overview of the different modes (e.g., direct and indirect ones) of obtaining a chiral separation in HPLC and CE. The direct approaches, i.e., those where the compound of interest is not derivatized prior to separation, are discussed in more detail since they are cnrrently the most frequently used techniques. These approaches require the use of the so-called chiral selectors to enable enantioselective recognition and enantiomeric separation. Many different molecnles have been nsed as chiral selectors, both in HPLC and CE. They can be classified into three different groups, based on their... 

Resolution is optimized by adjusting the buffer pH and the amount of organic modifiers. The most commonly used buffers are perchlorate, acetate, and phosphate. The protocol of the selection and optimization of the mobile phase for the enantiomeric resolution of drugs on polysaccharide-based CSPs in reversed-phase mode is presented in Scheme 2. Table 4 correlates the effects of separation conditions for neutral, acidic, and basic drugs on polysaccharide-based CSPs. From Table 4, it may be concluded that a simple mixture of water and an organic modifier will produce chiral separation of a neutral molecule because there is no... 

More than half of small druglike molecules are chiral. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires testing of pure enantiomers. Such testing is most useful early on in drug development. SFC is dramatically superior to HPLC for chiral separations. SFC offers dramatically faster method development and should be the technique of choice for any molecules soluble in organic solvents (i.e., most druglike molecules). Further, unlike capillary electrophoresis, SFC is fully scalable. A method developed at the analytical scale should work equally well at the semiprep level. 

Certainly, a couple of important points can be made from the entire collection of work on chiral separation by CMOPMs (a) the size of the pore should fit the substrate for proper enantiodifferenciating interactions (b) different mode of interactions of similar kind of substrates with the surface of the pores/channels alters enantioselec-tion ability. So far, the chiral separation ability of chiral metal-organic assanblies has been studied mostly with small molecules. However, the main goal of designing these materials is to utilize them for the separation of the enantiomers of relafively large molecules (e.g., drugs) and fiirther studies are required in this direction. 

This chapter will look at the use of CE for pharmaceutical analysis and will include descriptions of the various modes of CE and their suitability for quantitative and qualitative analysis of pharmaceutical compounds. Practical applications of CE for the analysis of pharmaceuticals will be covered, these applications include drug assay, impurity determination, physicochemical measurements, chiral separations, and the analysis of small molecules. A section covering the approach to CE method development for pharmaeeutical analysis will include guidelines to selecting the best mode of CE for an intended separation. Extensive data will be provided on successful pharmaceutical separations with references to extra source material for the interested reader. This chapter will provide a comprehensive and up to date view of the role and importance of CE for the analysis of pharmaceuticals and will provide the reader with practical information and real data that will help them to decide if CE is suitable for an intended separation. 

---