Ultrafast chiral separations for high throughput enantiopurity analysis

Recent developments in fast chromatographic enantioseparations now make high throughput analysis of enantiopurity on the order of a few seconds achievable. Nevertheless, routine chromatographic determinations of enantiopurity to support stereochemical investigations in pharmaceutical research and development, synthetic chemistry and bioanalysis are still typically performed on the 5-20 min timescale, with many practitioners believing that sub-minute enantioseparations are not representative of the molecules encountered in day to day research. In this study we develop ultrafast chromatographic enantioseparations for a variety of pharmaceutically-related drugs and intermediates, showing that sub-minute resolutions are now possible in the vast majority of cases by both supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) and reversed phase liquid chromatography (RP-LC). Examples are provided illustrating how such methods can be routinely developed and used for ultrafast high throughput analysis to support enantioselective synthesis investigations.