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.

     

Simple but efficient synthesis of novel substituted benzimidazoles over ZrO2-Al2O3

Solid-acid catalytic materials such as ZrO₂-Al₂O₃ containing 80?mol% of ZrO₂ were prepared by the solution combustion method (SCM) using different fuels such as urea, hexamethylene tetramine, glycine, and sucrose. All the prepared solid acid catalytic materials were characterized for their physico-chemical properties like crystalinity, acidity, functionality and morphology. These materials were evaluated for their catalytic activity in the synthesis of a series of novel substituted benzimidazoles. The reaction conditions were optimized by varying the solvents, reaction temperature, weight of solid acid catalyst, molar ratio of the reactants, and reaction time. The ZrO₂-Al₂O₃ solid acid catalytic material prepared by urea as a fuel was found to be highly active, recyclable, and reusable in the synthesis of benzimidazoles. A possible reaction mechanism for the synthesis of benzimidazoles is also proposed.