The Column - July 2008 - (Page 30)

Q&A The Column www.thecolumn.eu.com July 2008 SFC — The Innovative Approach The Column spoke to Jeffrey Kiplinger from Averica Drug Discovery about the benefits of using SFC as a purification tool in drug discovery. Why did your company decide to specialize in contract purifications for drug discovery? Resolution of racemic mixtures into pure enantiomers makes up about 80% of our business. Working with single enantiomers in the drug discovery phase was rarely done 10 years ago, but it’s an increasing concern of discovery teams today. We’re good in this niche and our scientific staff have drug discovery backgrounds. Contract research organizations (CROs) have a great opportunity in general right now, with both small and big pharma looking at outsourcing as a means of diversifying their approach. Most big firms look to us to provide excess capacity, while the small ones use us when they need a specialized approach to a problem. What are the advantages of SFC over other techniques? Compared with normal-phase HPLC, SFC is 5–10 times faster, consumes 2–10 times less solvent, and often makes preparative chromatography more efficient by increasing sample loading. SFC also allows a broader range of solvents over HPLC because most solvents are miscible with CO2. Using all of these advantages, a typical enantiomeric separation takes us about one-third to one-tenth of the time of a comparable HPLC separation, and saves solvent and waste disposal expenses. What were the main obstacles you encountered when implementing SFC and how did you overcome them? SFC technology is maturing rapidly but the instrument companies are still settling on the best designs for the systems. Historical problems like backpressure regulation and interfaces to mass spectrometers have been overcome but SFC is not yet plug-and-play like reversed-phase HPLC, for example. We’re a dedicated chromatography group, so we’re good at solving problems as they develop. I’d say that the biggest obstacle facing generalist labs is that they have to dedicate human resources to SFC — it’s not a “walk-up” or a “walk-away” technology yet. Why rely on SFC as your primary technology? The separation efficiency of SFC, all other things being equal, is 3–10 times greater than HPLC. SFC uses less solvent and is simple to run. That said, it’s often more difficult to develop optimal methods for SFC and more difficult to predict performance. SFC is still a little bit of an art compared with HPLC. This also makes us more valuable as a provider because we have the experience and expertise that a company new to SFC will need some time to acquire. Why has there been renewed interest in SFC recently? How has the technology evolved? The speed and lowered solvent costs have increased interest among scientists, particularly in pharma. The drug discovery world is particularly interested in chiral separations as an early way to explore structure-activity relationships in vitro and in vivo. We talked about the evolution and what’s still to come in Is there an environmental benefit to using SFC? Low solvent consumption and waste is the biggest environmental benefit, and the CO2 used is a recycled industrial by-product. For large companies these can add up to some dramatic cost savings. Author: Jeffrey Kiplinger E-mail: jeff.kiplinger@avericadiscovery.com 30 http://www.thecolumn.eu.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Column - July 2008

The Column - July 2008
Contents
Automation of Vitamin D Analysis to Provide Higher Throughput
News
Incognito
Market Trends and Analysis
Mixed-Mode Solid-Phase Extraction of Basic Drugs from Biological Fluid
Enhancing GC–MS Analysis of Trace Compounds using a Dynamic Approach to Reducing Background Interference
LC–MS–MS Analysis of Antibiotics in Wastewater
Q&A

The Column - July 2008