Separation of praziquantel enantiomers using simulated moving bed chromatographic unit with performance designed for semipreparative applications.

Praziquantel (PZQ) composes a regular medicine available in a tablet form to fight schistosomiasis and just half of its mass is composed by the active principle (L-PZQ), the other half, D-PZQ, is frequently associated to a strong bitter taste. Moreover, optically pure L-PZQ derivatives could be used in studies about adult and juvenile worms' resistance. Nowadays, these studies use racemic PZQ (rac-PZQ) as starting point. The D-PZQ, which would be discarded, could be racemized, coming back as feed concentration in the process. The present work aims to get L-PZQ and D-PZQ with high optical purities (more than 97%) and productivity (more than 253 g kgads -1  day-1 ) towards semipreparative scale for researches involving L-PZQ, L-PZQ derivatives, and D-PZQ racemization. In order to achieve this goal, a built-in-house simulated moving bed chromatographic unit with the cellulose tris (3-chloro-4-methylphenylcarbamate) (Chiralcel OZ) as chiral stationary phase (CSP) was used to investigate different scenarios of separation according to a well-known design method called triangle theory. In all scenarios investigated, at least one of the outlet streams presented high optically purity for one of the enantiomers. Comparison with literature showed superior performance of our unit even at racemic mixture concentrations that were 10 times lower than the racemic concentrations found in literature.

A kryptoracemic salt: 2-{[2,8-bis-(tri-fluoro-meth-yl)quinolin-4-yl](hy-droxy)meth-yl}piperidin-1-ium (+)-3,3,3-tri-fluoro-2-meth-oxy-2-phenyl-propanoate.

The asymmetric unit of the title salt, C17H17F6N2O(+)·C10H8F3O3 (-), comprises two piperidin-1-ium cations and two carboxyl-ate anions. The cations, each having an l-shaped conformation owing to the near orthogonal relationship between the quinolinyl and piperidin-1-ium residues, are pseudo-enanti-omeric. The anions have the same absolute configuration but differ in the relative orientations of the carboxyl-ate, meth-oxy and benzene groups. Arguably, the most prominent difference between the anions occurs about the Cq-Om bond as seen in the Cc-Cq-Om-Cm torsion angles of -176.1 (3) and -67.1 (4)°, respectively (q = quaternary, m = meth-oxy and c = carboxyl-ate). The presence of Oh-H⋯Oc and Np-H⋯Oc hydrogen bonds leads to the formation of a supra-molecular chain along the a axis (h = hy-droxy and p = piperidin-1-ium); weak intra-molecular Np-H⋯Oh hydrogen bonds are also noted. Chains are connected into a three-dimensional architecture by C-H⋯F inter-actions. Based on a literature survey, related mol-ecules/cations adopt a uniform conformation in the solid state based on the letter L.

Use of the harmonic mean to the determination of dissociation constants of stereoisomeric mixtures of biologically active compounds.

Herein we introduce the derivation of a mathematical expression to evaluate the dissociation constant of a mixture of stereoisomers in equal amounts (KdMIX), when the corresponding dissociation constants (Kd) or medium response (MR50) of the pure stereoisomers are known; the final equation takes the form of the harmonic mean. In order to validate the equation, we carried out a bibliographic search of experimental data of enantiomeric molecules with biological activity, considering the Kd's or MR50's of the isolated enantiomers as well as that of the racemate. The comparisons between the experimental dissociation constants of the mixtures (KdEXP or MR50EXP) and the calculated values (KdMIX or MR50MIX) were consistent; the similarity between these values is supported through statistical analyses of group comparison and simple linear correlation. The equation we obtained, which corresponds to the harmonic mean, was used to predict the values of KdMIX (or MR50MIX) or Kd (or MR50) in systems when only two of the experimental values are known: either the dissociation constants of both enantiomers or the Kd (or MR50) of one of the enantiomers and dissociation constant of the racemate.