Chromatographic Society Meetings Round-Up - E A Adlard

The topic of this meeting was “Current Method Development Strategies in Separation Science” although a more accurate title would have been “Current Method Development Strategies in HPLC in the Pharmaceutical Industry” since this was the theme of all the papers except for one on SFC. To one who has been in the field for a long time and can now afford the luxury of an overview the current situation in HPLC seems to bear a resemblance to GC in the days of packed columns when there were hundreds of stationary phases available, many of them giving identical separation. This dilemma was rationalised in GC with the development of high efficiency silica capillary columns and to a certain extent HPLC is following the same road with the development of uHPLC. However, HPLC has many more parameters that can be changed than GC so that arriving at
optimum separation is a much more complicated process.

The opening talk was by Dr Chris Welch on “Chiral Chromatographic Method Development”. Chiral stationary phases (CSP) may be extremely expensive to prepare but Dr Welch has developed methods of microscale, multiparallel method development with a “coffee-break cycle time” (scientific) evaluation requiring only a few milligrams of material. This allows more CSP including experimental ones to be evaluated, thus ensuring that it is the very best chiral separation that progresses towards preparative work. Also, loading studies to optimise up-scale throughput may be carried out on the microscale systems.