Open-access liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry in a drug discovery environment

The use of open-access mass spectrometry to monitor synthetic chemistry reactions, and also the integrity and purity of new chemical entities, has been a part of the medicinal chemist's tool-box for more than 5 years. Originally in our group at Wyeth Research there were two open-access methods available to the chemists, flow injection analysis (FIA) and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). The FIA method was approximately 3 min long, while the LC/MS method was approximately 20 min long (including an 8 min gradient). Within the first 2 years, the total number of open-access analyses increased by approximately 125%. It is interesting, however, that the number of LC/MS analyses increased by more than 285%. This is attributed to the fact that the chemists began using the LC/MS data to monitor reactions and also to check final product integrity and purity. In addition, the number of chemists performing parallel synthesis reactions has increased; thus, individual chemists can produce sample sets of up to 100 vials. This paper describes the implementation of new methodology, which accommodates the need for much faster run times and also the ability to acquire alternating positive and negative ion spectra within the same run. In addition, the instrument has been configured to e-mail the resulting processed data report to the submitting chemist. Several methods have been developed, including structure elucidation using in-source collision-induced dissociation (CID) and night-time analysis. The LC/MS methods for this system are described herein and are applicable to both industrial and academic synthetic chemistry optimization efforts.