Novel method to determine optical purity of drug components

Iranian researchers presented a novel method to measure and determine the medical formulations and purity of chiral materials in them.
The proposed method is cheap, sensitive and simple in comparison with the existing methods, and it does not need any separation process.
Many chemical compounds used in the formulation of drugs have one or a few chiral centers. Various enantiomers of the chiral compounds show different biological activities in the living systems during the medical and pharmaceutical processes. The difference can be so great that one of the enantiomers shows the desirable medical properties while another enantiomer is known as a highly toxic component for the biological environment.
Strict standards have been devised to deal with chiral compounds and their purity. Therefore, sensitive and precise detection methods are required to determine the purity. As a result, the main objective of the research was to present a sensitive, applied, quick, reliable and cost-efficient method for the analysis of chiral compounds.
In this research, a novel method was presented based on the resonance of light scattering for the measurement of enantiomers of the target components in the presence of one another. The proposed method enables the determination and measurement of enantiomers at the range of nanogram per liter with high sensitivity and selectivity in the presence of various enantiomers. The obtained results can be used in all industries that deal with the synthesis of organic materials for biological purposes.
Results obtained from laboratorial samples show that the method is practically acceptable and it has high reliability.
Results of the research have been published in Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, vol. 210, issue 1, 2015, pp. 439-455.