Surface-imprinted microspheres prepared by a template-oriented method for the chiral separation of amlodipine.

The surface imprinting technique has been developed to overcome the mass-transfer difficulty, but the utilization ratio of template molecules in the imprinting procedure still remains a challengeable task to be improved. In this work, specifically designed surface-imprinted microspheres were prepared by a template-oriented method for enantioseparation of amlodipine besylate. Submicron mesoporous silica microspheres were surface-modified with double bonds, followed by polymerizing methacrylic acid to generate carboxyl modified mesoporous silica microspheres (PMAA@SiO2 ). Afterwards, PMAA@SiO2 was densely adsorbed with (S)-amlodipine molecules to immobilize template molecules through multiple hydrogen bonding interactions. Then surface molecular imprinting was carried out by cross-linking the carboxyl group of PMAA@SiO2 with ethylene glycol diglycidyl ether. The surface-imprinted microspheres showed fast binding kinetics of only 20 min for equilibrium adsorption, and the saturation adsorption capacity reached 137 mg/g. The imprinted materials displayed appreciable chiral separation ability when used as column chromatography for enantioseparation of amlodipine from amlodipine besylate, and the enantiomeric excess of (S)-amlodipine reached 13.8% with only 2.3 cm column length by no extra chiral additives. Besides, the imprinted materials exhibited excellent reusability, and this allows the potential application for amplification production of amlodipine enantiomer.

Highly efficient chiral separation of amlodipine enantiomers via triple recognition hollow fiber membrane extraction.

In this study, a triple recognition chiral extraction process has been developed to separate (S)-amlodipine from racemic raw medicine, based on the combination of molecularly imprinted hollow fiber membrane and cross-flow biphasic recognition extraction. The chiral separation process was operated in a dismountable hollow fiber module coated with molecularly imprinted polymer, and the cross-flow extraction was applied with d-tartaric acid in feed phase and sulfobutyl ether-ß-cyclodextrin in stripping phase. The synergistic effect of molecularly imprinted polymer and dual chiral additives was investigated, and excellent enantioseparation ability with a selectivity factor of 1.98 was obtained. Mathematical model of S/R=0.598e0.150NTU for racemic amlodipine separation by molecularly imprinted hollow fiber membrane extraction was established. The optical purity for amlodipine is up to 90% when 4 hollow fiber membrane modules of 25cm in length in series are used. The triple recognition process strongly enhanced the separation selectivity; therefore it may bring about the potentially application for large-scale production of pure enantiomeric compound.

Rapid and efficient enantioseparation of (S)-amlodipine by surface-imprinted core-shell polymer microspheres.

We present a protocol for the preparation of surface-imprinted polymer microspheres by core-shell precipitation polymerization for the enantioseparation of (S)-amlodipine. In this work, submicron mesoporous silica microspheres were prepared with gemini cationic surfactant as soft template. Molecularly imprinted polymers were coated on the silica supports with a low level of crosslinking, and the thickness of the thin-walled imprinted shell was about 45 nm. The material showed fast binding kinetics for (S)-amlodipine (within only 20 min for complete equilibrium), and the saturation adsorption capacity reached 309.2 mg/g, indicating the good accessibility of binding sites and improved mass transfer for target molecule. The imprinted microspheres exhibited an appreciable enantiomeric excess of (S)-amlodipine of 11.3% when used as a glass chromatography column for the enantioseparation of (S)-amlodipine from amlodipine besylate without extra chiral additives. The surface-imprinted materials display potentially amplification for industrial enantioseparation of (S)-amlodipine.