Chromatographic selectivity study of 4-fluorophenylacetic acid positional isomers separation.

Unique properties of the fluorine atom stimulate widespread use and development of new organofluorine compounds in agrochemistry, biotechnology and pharmacology applications. However, relatively few synthetic methods exhibit a high degree of fluorination selectivity, which ultimately results in the presence of structurally related fluorinated isomers in the synthetic product. This outcome is undesirable from a pharmaceutical perspective as positional isomers possess different reactivity, biological activity and toxicity as compared to the desired product. It is advantageous to control positional isomers in the early stages of the synthetic process, as rejection and analysis of these isomers will likely become more difficult in later stages. The current work reports the development of a chromatographic analysis of 2- and 3-fluorophenylacetic acid positional isomer impurities in 4-fluorophenylacetic acid (4-FPAA), a building block in the synthesis of an active pharmaceutical ingredient. The method is employed as a part of a Quality by Design Approach to control purity of the starting material in order to eliminate the presence of undesirable positional isomers in the final drug substance. During method development, a wide range of chromatographic conditions and structurally related positional isomer probe molecules were exploited in an effort to gain insight into the specifics of the separation mechanism. For the systems studied it was shown that the choice of organic modifier played a key role in achieving acceptable separation. Further studies encompassed investigation of temperature influence on retention and selectivity of the FPAA isomers separation. Thermodynamic analysis of these data showed that the selectivity of the 2- and 4- fluorophenylacetic acids separation was dominated by an enthalpic process, while the selectivity of the 4- and 3-fluorophenylacetic acids separation was exclusively entropy driven (Delta(DeltaH degrees approximately 0). Studies of chromatographic behavior were complemented by solid state NMR experiments which provided valuable information regarding the relationship between stationary phase solvation and selectivity.

Practical comparison of 2.7 microm fused-core silica particles and porous sub-2 microm particles for fast separations in pharmaceutical process development.

Fused-core silica stationary phases represent a key technological advancement in the arena of fast HPLC separations. These phases are made by fusing a 0.5 microm porous silica layer onto 1.7 microm nonporous silica cores. The reduced intra-particle flow path of the fused particles provides superior mass transfer kinetics and better performance at high mobile phase velocities, while the fused-core particles provide lower pressure than sub-2 microm particles. In this work, chromatographic performance of the fused-core particles (Ascentis Express) was investigated and compared to that of sub-2 microm porous particles (1.8 microm Zorbax Eclipse Plus C18 and 1.7 microm Acquity BEH C18). Specifically, retention, selectivity, and loading capacity were systematically compared for these two types of columns. Other chromatographic parameters such as efficiency and pressure drop were also studied. Although the fused-core column was found to provide better analyte shape selectivity, both columns had similar hydrophobic, hydrogen bonding, total ion-exchange, and acidic ion-exchange selectivities. As expected, the retention factors and sample loading capacity on the fused-core particle column were slightly lower than those for the sub-2 microm particle column. However, the most dramatic observation was that similar efficiency separations to the sub-2 microm particles could be achieved using the fused-core particles, without the expense of high column back pressure. The low pressure of the fused-core column allows fast separations to be performed routinely on a conventional LC system without significant loss in efficiency or resolution. Applications to the HPLC impurity profiling of drug substance candidates were performed using both types of columns to validate this last point.