Capillary electrokinetic separation techniques for profiling of drugs and related products

Capillary electrokinetic separation techniques offer high efficiency and pe ak capacity, and can be very useful for the analysis of samples containing a large variety of (unknown) compounds. Such samples are frequently met in impurity profiling of drugs (detection of potential impurities in a pharmac eutical substance or product) and in general sample profiling (determinatio n of differences or similarities between samples). In this paper, the poten tial, merits, and limitations of electrokinetic separation techniques for p rofiling purposes are evaluated using examples from literature. A distincti on is made between impurity profiling, forensic profiling and profiling of natural products, and the application of capillary zone electrophoresis, mi cellar electrokinetic chromatography, and capillary electrochromatography i n these fields is discussed. Attention is devoted to important aspects such as selectivity, resolution enhancement, applicability, detection, and comp ound confirmation and quantification. The specific properties of the variou s electrokinetic techniques are discussed and compared with more convention al techniques as liquid chromatography.