Direct HPLC enantioseparation of omeprazole and its chiral impurities: Application to the determination of enantiomeric purity of esomeprazole magnesium trihydrate

Analytical and semipreparative high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) enantioseparation of the proton-pump inhibitor omeprazole (OME) and its potential organic chiral impurities were accomplished on the immobilised-type Chiralpak IA chiral stationary phase (CSP) under both polar organic and normal-phase conditions. The (S)-enantiomers were isolated with a purity of >99% ee and their absolute configuration was empirically assigned by circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. A chemo- and enantioselective HPLC method was validated to control the enantiomeric purity of the (S)-enantiomer of OME (ESO), an active ingredient contained in drug products, in the presence of chiral and achiral related substances. The precision, linearity and accuracy of the determination of the (R)-impurity as well as the recovery of ESO from a pharmaceutical preparation were determined.The proposed method uses the mixture methyl tert-butylether (MtBE)–ethyl acetate (EA)–ethanol (EtOH)–diethylamine (DEA) 60:40:5:0.1 (v/v/v/v) as a mobile phase. In these conditions, linearity over the concentration range 0.5–25 μg/ml for (R)-enantiomer was obtained. The limits of detection and quantification were 99 and 333 ng/ml, respectively. The intra and inter-day assay precision was less than 2% (RSD%).