Preparative Liquid Chromatography and Centrifugal Partition Chromatography for Purification of New Anticancer Precursors

In organic synthesis, the purification of reactional intermediates or final products is generally carried out by normal phase flash chromatography. However, for dihydrodipyridopyrazines, a new family of antitumor agents, the efficiency of this technique is too low to achieve the purification of the isomer mixture. Purification of the DHDPP isomer mixture has therefore been studied using preparative liquid chromatography. With the stationary phase used in flash chromatography, PLC provides greater efficiency and allows to increase the mobile phase flow rate. A complete study of preparative purification was performed, including that of compounds solubility and analytical optimization. This work has allowed to lower the overlap between the two DHDPP isomers, to greatly reduce the total duration of the process, to increase the purified quantity per run and consequently to greatly improve the throughput of the purification. In addition, this technique can be easily and totally automated. Concurrently, another purification method (centrifugal partition chromatography ), based on acidic constants difference of the two components in two immiscible liquids, was developed. CPC has demonstrated its ability to separate the two DHDPP isomers. Finally, the economic aspects of PLC and CPC results are compared.