Articles & Tech Notes

In the modern purification laboratory, many thousands of novel drug-like compounds are being purified each week. Preparative high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is the method of choice. A major issue within the laboratory is traceability of each compound, tube, and fraction. What are the costs of confusion in the laboratory? Lost sample, lost time, lost money, lost contract, lost job? Typically, a 5 to 10mg injection of compound will produce anywhere between 2 and 5 fractions, depending upon various factors, including; initial purity of sample, method of triggering fraction collector, pump speed and fraction collection tube volume. This begins to create a sizeable problem. Even in a lower throughput lab, this is clearly a huge increase in number of tubes to track. Downstream of HPLC samples need to be analysed, often a daughter sample is taken for analysis which is another doubling in sample numbers. The problem has become much worse! The remainder of the process is usually simple, drying, redissolving, and combining to obtain one final sample of pure compound, usually in a new tube, vial, or plate well. What are the options for managing traceability? This article looks at some of the options and studies the processes of two leading companies who have developed successful solutions.