Abstract

Importance of Chirality and Chiral Chromatography in Pharmaceutical Industry : A Detailed Study

Author(s): Ashish Mukherjee and Ajoy Bera

A large percentage of commercial and investigational pharmaceutical compounds are enantiomers, and many of them show significant enantioselective differences in their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. The importance of chirality of drugs has been increasingly recognized, and the consequences of using them as racemates or as enantiomers have been frequently discussed in the pharmaceutical literature during recent years. With increasing evidence of problems related to stereoselectivity in drug action, enantioselective analysis by chromatographic methods has become the focus of intensive research of separation scientists. The separation of chiral compounds has been of great interest because the majority of bioorganic molecules are chiral. Living organisms, for example, are composed of chiral biomolecules such as amino acids, sugars, proteins and nucleic acids. This paper presents the importance of chirality in pharmaceutical substances and basic consideration in method development for chiral compounds by High Performance Liquid Chromatoraphy (HPLC).