Modern chiral separation strategies: a tool to facilitate the development of QSRR models

More than half of the newly commercialized medicines possess chiral properties. Because the enantiomer that is not responsible for the therapeutic effect may have potential toxic effects, very strict guidelines should be followed for the development of a chiral medicine, strongly favoring enantiopure drugs. The separation of chiral drug molecules is therefore an intensively studied topic.
The selection of the appropriate separation technique in combination with the appropriate experimental conditions is the most time-consuming part of chiral method development. Therefore, generic chiral separation strategies are developed to enable fast chiral method development without prior knowledge of the compounds’ structure.
A first aim of this project is to update the current separation strategies, focusing on high throughput, greenness, new stationary phase trends and the selection of volatile mobile phases to enable mass spectrometric detection. The most successful techniques will be integrated into one complete strategy. A second aim is to construct Quantitative Structure Retention Relationship (QSRR) models based on the enantiomer elution sequence. If the retention/separation of the
compounds can be linked to the presence of some structural features, this allows prediction of the best chromatographic system to enable the analysis of a new compound.