Pharmaceutical industry analytical techniques

The research process is a long-term commitment and requires high standards in the results from the very beginning. The quality of the results relies on competent analytical chemists, but also on the availability of good instrumentation, which is often evident in the laboratories of the research intensive pharmaceutical industry. Separation techniques, especially LC, have had an enormous impact on pharmaceutical analysis. The combination of LC with MS has now extended the possibilities of the techniques as qualitative and quantitative data can be obtained online. The availability of less-expensive bench-top instruments operated by nonspecialists has changed the situation considerably. 

In the pharmaceutical industry, it is essential to produce pure drug substance, suitable for human consumption, in a cost-effective manner. The purity of a drug substance can be checked by separation techniques such as GC, TLC, and HPLC. Both techniques tend to be more sensitive and specific than spectroscopic methods. HPLC has an advantage over GC as an analytical technique, since analytes need be neither volatile nor extremely stable to elevated temperatures. Highly accurate, almost universal detectors, such as... 

The simplest technique is the use of the 96-well collection plate format (analogous to the format used in SPE) in conjunction with a liquid handling robotic system it follows the same principle as bulk scale LLE. However, immobilization of the aqueous plasma sample on an inert solid support medium packed in a cartridge or in the individual wells of a 96-well plate and percolating a water-immiscible organic solvent to extract the analyte from this medium evoked significant enthusiasm from the pharmaceutical industry. 

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a modem analytical technique that allows the rapid and efficient separation of sample components based on differences in their electrophoretic mobilities as they migrate or move through narrow bore capillary tubes (Frazier et al., 2000a). While widely accepted in the pharmaceutical industry, the uptake of CE by food analysts has been slow due to the lack of literature dedicated to its application in food analysis and the absence of well-validated analytical procedures applicable to a broad range of food products. 

Hyphenated analytical techniques such as LC-MS, which combines liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, are well-developed laboratory tools that are widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. Eor some compounds, mass spectrometry alone is insufficient for complete structural elucidation of unknown compounds nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) can help elucidate the structure of these compounds (see Chapter 20). Traditionally, NMR experiments are performed on more or less pure samples, in which the signals of a single component dominate. Therefore, the structural analysis of individual components of complex mixtures is normally time-consuming and less cost-effective. The... 

The concurrent identification and quantification of organic impurities is a principal use of liquid chromatography in the pharmaceutical industry. However, the application of liquid chromatography to this task highlights a weakness of this technique when compared to gas chromatography specifically, the lack of a universal detector. Great strides have been made to create detectors and hyphenated techniques to address these problems. However, multiple detectors and analytical procedures may be necessary to accurately and specifically identify and quantify the impurities in complex systems. 

Over the past 40 years, capillary electrophoresis (CE) has advanced significantly as a technique for biomolecular characterization. It has not only passed the transition from a laboratory curiosity to a mature instrumental-based method for micro-scale separation, but also emerged as an indispensable tool in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. CE has become a method of choice in research and development (R D) for molecular characterization, and in quality control (QC) for the release of the therapeutic biomolecules.In the biopharmaceutical industry, more and more CE methods have been validated to meet International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) requirements. In this chapter, we present real industrial examples to demonstrate the role of CE in R D of pharmaceutical products. The focus in this chapter is on method development analytical control for manufacturing and release of therapeutic proteins and antibodies. 

Quantitative CE—MS studies were scarcely reported. " This subject is however of prime importance, particularly for the pharmaceutical industry where the reliability of analytical data is essential. For this reason, method development is generally followed by an evaluation of quantitative performance using an appropriate validation procedure performed in agreement with criteria established by the International Conference on Harmonisation of technical requirements for registration of pharmaceuticals for human use (ICH) and the Food and Drug Administraction (FDA) guidelines, or Societe Franqaise des Sciences et Techniques Pharmaceutiques (SFSTP) commissions. ... 

IR is one of three forms of vibrational spectroscopy that is in conunon use for process analytical measurements the other two being near-lR (NIR) and Raman. Each one of these techniques has its pros and cons and the ultimate selection is based on a number of factors ranging from sample type, information required, cost and ease of implementation. The sample matrix is often a key deciding factor. NIR has been the method of choice for many years within the pharmaceutical industry, and sample handling has been the issue, especially where solid products are involved. IR is not particularly easy to implement for the continuous monitoring of solid substrates. However, often there is no one correct answer, but often when the full application is taken into account the selection becomes more obvious. In some cases very obvious, such as the selection of IR for trace gas analysis - neither NIR nor Raman is appropriate for such applications. 

The strict regulations of the pharmaceutical industry have a significant effect on the quality control of final products, demanding the use of reliable and fast analytical methods. The capacity that the technique has for the simultaneous determination of several APIs with no need of, or with minimum, sample preparation has considerably increased its application in pharmaceutical analytical control. The main limitation of NIR is the relatively low sensitivity that limits the determination of APIs in preparations when their concentration is less than 0.1%. Nevertheless, instrumental improvements allow the determination below this limit depending on the nature of the analyte and the matrix, with comparable errors to the ones obtained with other instrumental techniques. The reference list presents an ample variety of analytical methodologies, types of samples, nature of analyte and calibration models. A detailed treatment of each one is beyond the scope of... 

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