The use of accurate mass measurement by orthogonal time-of-flight mass spectrometry in pharmaceuticals research

Allan Maccoll was the founding editor of Organic Mass Spectrometry, the fir st journal dedicated to the application of mass spectrometry to the analysi s of organic structures, Many papers in OMS described the elucidation of st ructures from natural and synthetic sources. This is still a major applicat ion of mass spectrometry today, especially in those fine chemical industrie s such as Pharmaceuticals which depend on the discovery and development of organic compounds for a variety of applications. In this paper we describe the advances we have made in the last few years, especially utilising time- of-flight (ToF) mass spectrometers, to use accurate mass measurement to det ermine the structures of minor components contained within drug substance a nd degraded samples. The additional information obtained from accurate mass measurement is shown to be critical in assigning a particular structure in a number of examples.