Determination of the enantiomeric purity of epinephrine by HPLC with circular dichroism detection.

Several hundred drug substances approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are chiral molecules. For the enantiomeric purity assessment, current practice is to develop separation techniques using chiral columns or mobile phase modifiers to separate enantiomers before detection. An alternative approach is to use currently accepted HPLC assay methods and use chiral-specific detectors to confirm whether the correct enantiomer is present. In this paper, adding a circular dichroism (CD) detector to an achiral HPLC method from the US Pharmacopeia (USP) is shown to be amenable for the determination of the enantiomeric purity of epinephrine, a substance used to treat anaphylaxis. This HPLC-UV-CD approach was able to detect the inactive D-(+) enantiomer at 1% of the total epinephrine composition. The linearity, accuracy, and precision of HPLC-UV-CD were evaluated and compared to analyses using a chiral HPLC method. Additionally, an epinephrine drug product was analyzed for assay (concentration) and enantiomeric purity. The results from achiral and chiral methods were identical within the experimental error. Overall, achiral chromatography performed using a USP method with CD detection may serve as a general means of determining chiral drug enantiomer purity and avoids the need for the development of additional chiral-specific methods for each individual drug.