Development of a comprehensive multidimensional capillary liquid chromatography (LCxLC) for drug analysis

• Grant number: 06/06602-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2007
• End date: February 28, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Chemistry
• Principal Investigator: Fernando Mauro Lanças
• Grantee: Christian Fernandes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Química de São Carlos (IQSC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The development of a new active pharmaceutical ingredient involves different steps, and many opportunities for the generation of impurities may arise. The safety of the drug depends not only on the toxicological properties of the active pharmaceutical ingredient itself, but on the impurities it contains. For this reason, accurate assessment of impurity profiles of active pharmaceutical ingredient is essential in pharmaceutical analysis. In the same way, forensic, clinical, and doping control analysis, as well as the determination of drugs in natural products and fitotherapics are challenging because involves complex matrices and a great number of compounds must be assessed.Liquid chromatography in one dimension (1-D) often does not provide enough resolution power to separate all compounds in complex samples. Main reason is the relatively low efficiency and peak capacity of state-of-the-art 1-D liquid chromatography. On the other hand, multidimensional liquid chromatography (2-D) has a high resolution power because it employs two different (orthogonal) displacements. In comprehensive LC x LC, a mode of 2-D separation, the first separation is completely detailed in the second dimension providing very high resolution and peak capacity.All the reported studies for the determination of drugs using LC x LC have employed columns of conventional dimensions. Capillary liquid chromatography presents many advantages over conventional chromatography and can be applied to build LC x LC systems. The use of high temperature and temperature gradient is a powerful tool to improve efficiency, selectivity and peak retention and has not been explored in LC x LC studies. This project aims to develop and optimize a comprehensive multidimensional capillary liquid chromatography system to analyze drugs in complex samples.