A Simple and Efficient Approach for Estimating Recovery of a Preparative Reversed Phase HPLC Purification

The widely applied reversed phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) is an indispensable purification technique in drug discovery. During drug discovery, recovery was usually calculated based on the weight of the purified product after drying over the weight of the crude material multiplied by the assumed purity from HPLC/UV area percent of the product. Such a purity assumption can be off significantly when the crude material contains water, solvents, other UV-inactive impurities and inorganic salts. In this paper, we report a simple and efficient way to estimate recovery of preparative HPLC purification process. It is based on the ratio of the HPLC/UV peak area measured for the product in the crude solution and that in the final collected fraction with both accounted for their volumes. This approach eliminates not only the need for drying of the collected fraction to calculate recovery but also the inaccuracy associated with the true content in the crude sample using the traditional method. A systematic study was conducted to verify this method using caffeine mixed with various UV-active and -inactive impurities. The calculated recoveries using this approach were found to be consistent within 4% with the true recoveries based on dry weight estimation. The approach has been successfully applied for our in-house purifications. Furthermore, the approach was extended to library purifications, where in many cases heart-cutting the desired peaks is used to meet the purity requirements.

     

Mass spectral fragmentation of the intravenous anesthetic propofol and structurally related phenols

Propofol (2,6-diisopropyl phenol) is a widely used intravenous anesthetic. To define its pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, methods for its quantitation in biological matrixes have been developed, but its pattern of mass spectral fragmentation is unknown. We found that fragmentation of the [M - H](-) ion (m/z 177) of propofol in both APCI MS/MS and ESI MS/MS involves the stepwise loss of a methyl radical and a hydrogen radical from one isopropyl side chain to give the most intense product ion, [M -H - CH(4)](-), at m/z 161. This two-step process is also the preferred mode of fragmentation for similar branched alkyl substituted phenols. This mode of fragmentation of the [M - H](-) ion is supported by three independent lines of evidence: (1) the presence of the intermediary [M - H - CH(3)](-) radical ion under conditions of reduced collision energy, (2) the determination of the mass of the predominant [M - H - CH(4)](-) product ion by high resolution mass spectrometry, and (3) the pattern of product ions resulting from further fragmentation of the [M - H - CH(4)](-) product ion. Phenols with a single straight chain alkyl substituent, in contrast, undergo beta elimination of the alkyl radical irrespective of the length of the alkyl chain, yielding the most intense product ion at m/z 106. This product ion represents a special case of a stable intermediary radical for the two-step process described for branched side chains, because further elimination of a hydrogen radical from the beta carbon is not possible.