Delivering the promise of SFC: a case study.

During the past years there has been a rapid development in supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) instrumentation making it a highly efficient and robust technique. Although much is written about the advantages of SFC over liquid chromatography (LC), there are not many direct comparisons detailing the gain in purification throughput, the savings in solvent consumption and the reduced environmental impact for large-scale SFC applications. We will show that a research scale separation laboratory built to handle multigram amounts can be used for kilogram separations when moving from LC to SFC.

Asymmetric synthesis of 2,4,5-trisubstituted Δ2-thiazolines.

Δ(2)-Thiazolines are interesting heterocycles that display a wide variety of biological characteristics. They are also common in chiral ligands used for asymmetric syntheses and as synthetic intermediates. Herein, we present asymmetric routes to 2,4,5-trisubstituted Δ(2)-thiazolines. These Δ(2)-thiazolines were synthesized from readily accessible/commercially available α,ß-unsaturated methyl esters through a Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation and an O→N acyl migration reaction as key steps. The final products were obtained in good yields with up to 97 % enantiomeric excess.

Evaluation of the chiral recognition properties as well as the column performance of four chiral stationary phases based on cellulose (3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) by parallel HPLC and SFC.

The performance of four commercially available cellulose tris(3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamate) based chiral stationary phases (CSPs) was evaluated with parallel high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and super critical fluid chromatography (SFC). Retention, enantioselectivity, resolution and efficiency were compared for a set of neutral, basic and acidic compounds having different physico-chemical properties by using different mobile phase conditions. Although the chiral selector is the same in all the four CSPs, a large difference in the ability to retain and resolve enantiomers was observed under the same chromatographic conditions. We believe that this is mainly due to differences in the silica matrix and immobilization techniques used by the different vendors. An extended study of metoprolol and structure analogues gave a deeper understanding of the accessibility of the chiral discriminating interactions and its impact on the resolution of the racemic compounds on the four CSPs studied. Also, a clear difference in enantioselectivity is observed between SFC and LC mode, hydrogen bonding was found to play an important role in the differential binding of the enantiomers to the CSPs.

Preparative chiral chromatography and chiroptical characterization of enantiomers of omeprazole and related benzimidazoles.

To chiroptically characterize the enantiomers of omeprazole and some structurally related benzimidazoles with circular dichroism (CD), preparative chiral liquid chromatography was utilized for the isolation of the pure enantiomers. A limited analytical column screen was performed identifying Kromasil-CHI-TBB and the amylose-based phases Chiralpak AD and AS as possible chiral stationary phases (CSPs) for the preparative scale separation of the enantiomers of the different benzimidazoles. Optimization of the chromatographic conditions with respect to retention, enantioseparation, and resolution was achieved by variation of the mobile phase constituents as well as of temperature. Because of the lability of the compound in slightly acidic media, supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) could not be applied for a preparative scale separation of the enantiomers. The separation of omeprazole was optimized to give high throughput (2.6 kg racemate/kg CSP/day) and high enantiomeric excess of the obtained isomers. The absolute configurations of the pure enantiomers of rabeprazole, lansoprazole, and pantoprazole were determined from the strong correlation to the CD spectrum of (+)-(R)-omeprazole. For all the compounds, the (+)-enantiomers displayed similar chiroptical features as (+)-(R)-omeprazole and were thus assigned the (R)- configuration. Elution order of the optical isomers was monitored by injecting racemic solutions spiked with one of the isomers and also by an on-line laser polarimeter. Both the type of CSP and also the mobile phase constituents had a strong effect on elution order of the enantiomers.