Spectroscopic methods for determining enantiomeric purity and absolute configuration in chiral pharmaceutical molecules.

Abstract

Analytical support, such as methods development, along with identification and characterization of intermediates and impurities, are critical in the development of a chemical process. The preparation of a drug substance requires the development of analytical methods for monitoring reactions and identifying impurities. Methods development for a chiral drug molecule is more difficult as the method must be capable of monitoring the overall reaction as well as possible racemization of starting materials and products. Chiral methods are often required to monitor the reaction steps of a synthesis, however, the development of enantiomeric purity methods are time-consuming and expensive. The use of chiroptical detectors, such as circular dichroism (CD), optical rotation (OR) and vibrational circular dichroism (VCD), can help to reduce or eliminate the need to develop chiral monitoring methods and also to predict absolute configuration. Recently, VCD has shown remarkable success with the latter and currently holds the most promise as a general, direct method that can be used as an alternative to X-ray crystallography. Each of the mentioned techniques can help analytical chemists to reduce the time associated with traditional enantiomeric purity methods development and to determine absolute configuration. This review will discuss the scope and limitations of these techniques for the rapid and routine determination of both enantiomeric excess and absolute configuration.