Ruggedness study of HPLC peptide mapping for the identity of a drug compound: A chemometrics approach

A statistically more reliable approach than the traditional visual inspecti on of peptide maps to identify a drug compound is to generate a set of refe rence standards from a designed experiment that incorporates many possible factors that affect variation of peptide mapping. In fact, the experiment c an be done for a ruggedness study as part of a high-performance liquid chro matography (HPLC) method validation. Once the ruggedness is proved with the study, those articles in the experiment may form a set of reference standa rds, and future articles can be compared to the set later to prove identity . A quantitative analysis of the ruggedness study can be done using a chemo metrics approach, principal component analysis (PCA). The analysis is used to reduce the many channels of peptide maps to a few manageable dimensions. The scores projected onto the reduced dimensions are used to test factor e ffects of the ruggedness study. As a by-product, the analysis provides visu al inspection of the set of articles in the experiment for any outliers and anomalies.