Robust optimization of psychotropic drug mixture separation in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography.

This paper presents multiobjective optimization of complex mixtures separation in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC). The selected model mixture consisted of five psychotropic drugs: clozapine, thioridazine, sulpiride, pheniramine and lamotrigine. Three factors related to the mobile phase composition (acetonitrile content, pH of the water phase and concentration of ammonium acetate) were optimized in order to achieve the following goals: maximal separation quality, minimal total analysis duration and robustness of an optimum. The consideration of robustness in early phases of the method development provides reliable methods with low risk for failure in validation phase. The simultaneous optimization of all goals was achieved by multiple threshold approach combined with grid point search. The identified optimal separation conditions (acetonitrile content 83%, pH of the water phase 3.5 and ammonium acetate content in water phase 14 mM) were experimentally verified.

Thorough investigation of the retention mechanisms and retention behavior of amides and sulfonamides on amino column in hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography.

In this paper detailed analysis of a mixture of four amides (tropicamide, nicotinamide, tiracetam, and piracetam) and six sulfonamides (sulfanilamide, sulfacetamide, sulfamethoxazole, sulfafurazole, furosemide, and bumetanide) on aminopropyl column in hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) was carried out. Since, there are no papers on the topic of the assessment of the contribution of ion-exchange retention mechanism involved in the separation of the acidic compounds on aminopropyl column in HILIC mode, the authors utilized the retention data of the acidic sulfonamides for this purpose. Next, broad range of the aqueous buffer concentrations in the mobile phase was examined providing the separation under either HILIC or RP conditions. Turning points between these two mechanisms were determined and then the fitting of the experimental data in the localized and non-localized adsorption models in both RP and HILIC regions was assessed. Since not many papers in the literature were dealing with the estimation of factor influence on the retention behavior of neutral and acidic compounds on aminopropyl column in HILIC, Box-Behnken design and Response Surface Methodology were applied. On the basis of the obtained data, ten quadratic models were proposed and their adequacy was confirmed using ANOVA test. Furthermore, retention data was graphically evaluated by the construction of 3D response surface plots. Finally, good predictive ability of the suggested models was proved with five additional verification experiments.