Subminute micro-isolation of pharmaceuticals with ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography

The drive for faster separations while maintaining quality and yield remains an important consideration for enhanced productivity as well as cost reduction for drug discovery laboratories in the pharmaceutical industry. High-throughput experimentation (HTE) and high-throughput screening (HTS) techniques can benefit from rapid and efficient isolation of product at high purity and recovery from microgram-scale crude reaction mixtures. In this study we describe the isolation of small molecule and biomolecule crude mixtures at the microgram-scale (100-2500 μg) in single or library format with methods as fast as 1.0 min and system pressures averaging 10,000 psi with an ultra-high pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) setup. UHPLC technology provides several advantages for rapid (<1.0 min) separations with small-particle (1.8-3.5 μm) size 4.6 × 50 mm C18 columns such as minimal extra column and delay volume, fast detector response time, and higher linear velocities for improved speed and resolution. We typically see a 5-10 fold improvement in purification time and overall sample processing time with low fraction volumes and same-day drying when compared with traditional semi-preparative techniques. There is a significant 50-fold reduction in solvent usage per run, resulting in a much lower cost of solvent and waste handling. Fluidic pathways have been optimized for collection into tared high-density 96 or 384 well 2D barcoded storage tubes in a microtiter plate (MTP) layout. Coupling the system to robotics has enabled us to implement a fully integrated automation platform with additional capabilities for small-scale purification at high speed and reduced cost of materials. The resulting arrays of small-quantity, high-purity compounds enable synthetic route scouting for HTE and HTS for biological target validation.