Ion mobility in the pharmaceutical industry: an established biophysical technique or still niche?

Over the past decade ion mobility (IM) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) has emerged as a wide spread analytical technique, utilized in research areas ranging from small molecule to proteins analyzed under native-MS and solution conditions. The ion-neutral collision cross section (Ω) derived from an IM experiment can be used to make inferences about the ion's size, shape and charge distribution, when compared to molecular dynamic (MD) or quantum mechanically (QM) derived candidate structures. IM can also be used as an orthogonal separation technique when coupled with liquid chromatographic (LC) separations. IM has been readily adopted by academic research groups and has been demonstrated to be highly enabling, resulting in the inception of completely new research areas, such as gas-phase structural biology. The same cannot be said for IM in pharma, where it is still perceived as a standalone, research-only based analytical tool. Herein, we will describe key innovations of IM instrumentation by current MS vendors and IMs application within academic and pharmaceutical research and how these developments have been, and can be applied to research discovery efforts within the pharmaceutical industry.