SFC/MS/UV/ELSD: Integrated Hyphenation Technique For Drug Discovery

Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has attracted great interest as a chromatographic technique in pharmaceutical industry. Compared to high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), SFC demonstrated higher efficiency, reduction of solvent usage and green chemistry for the safe aspect of inert carbon dioxide in the place of toxic organic solvent as in HPLC. In addition, over the past few years, analytical SFC has started to be evaluated as an orthogonal technique from HPLC for pharmaceutical analysis in both qualitative and quantitative terms.

At Pfizer Ann Arbor Discovery Laboratory we have installed the hyphenated analytical SFC system coupled with mass spectrometry (MS), ultra-violet (UV) and evaporated light scattering (ELSD). This system is used as both qualitative (screening) and quantitative analysis tool for medicinal chemistry support. The system is completely integrated, controlled by single software. The operation is straightforward and easy to use. This enables us to automate most of the routine analysis for better productivity. The systematic tests on compound characterisation and calibration by the hyphenated detection techniques (MS, UV and ELSD) from this setup are carried out, and the system performance were evaluated in both qualitative and quantitative aspects.