An evaluation of four commercial HPLC chiral detectors: a comparison of three polarimeters and a circular dichroism detector.

With increasing frequency, new drug candidates being introduced into pharmaceutical drug pipelines are chiral. Often only one enantiomer exhibits the desired biological activity and the other enantiomer may exhibit undesired side effects, thereby making chiral purity an important parameter. The introduction of chiral analysis adds additional complications in drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is constantly striving to streamline processes and improve efficiencies in an effort to move molecules to market quickly. In order to simplify the process of chiral method development, chiral screening can be set up, however a successful chiral screen depends on optimizing two factors: the column and the detector. The following work investigated the second factor and evaluated two types of commercially available chiral detectors for their possible use in chiral method development and screening: polarimeters and circular dichroism (CD) detectors. Linearity, precision, and the limit of detection (LD) of six compounds (trans-stilbene oxide, ethyl chrysanthemate, propranolol, 1-methyl-2-tetralone, naproxen, methyl methionine) on four commercial detectors (three polarimeters and one CD detector) were determined experimentally and the limit of quantitation (LQ) calculated from the experimental LD. Trans-stilbene oxide worked well across all the detectors, showing good linearity, precision and low detection limits. However, the other five compounds proved to be more discriminating and showed that the circular dichroism detector performed better as a detector for chiral screens, over the polarimeters.