ULTRA-FAST CHIRAL SEPARATION OF BASIC DRUGS BY CAPILLARY ELECTROPHORESIS

Chiral separation-methods development is usually very time-consuming, due to the diversity in chemical structures of pharmaceutical drug sub stances as well as the suitable separation conditions and the problem to choose the appropriate chiral selector. This paper shows an ultra-f ast, capillary electrophoresis based screening procedure which was dev eloped for chiral separation of several basic pharmaceuticals using di methyl-beta-cyclodextrin as chiral selector. Complete enantiomeric sep arations of basic drugs (metaproterenol and isoproterenol) were achiev ed as fast as in 40-50 s, with an R.S.D. for the absolute migration ti me reproducibility of less than 0.75%. The peak efficiency of the sepa rations was usually over one million theoretical plates per meter, whi ch correspond to an efficiency generation rate above 30 000 plates/m s .