Evaluation of mobile phase gradient supercritical fluid chromatography for impurity profiling of pharmaceutical compounds

The use of gradient supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) for the impurity profiling of pharmaceutical products is not widely practiced. Historically, the limited advancement in SFC instrumentation and the lag in column development have resulted in marginal sensitivity, selectivity and reproducibility when compared with high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Using a recently developed commercial module, which allows an ordinary HPLC to be converted to a SFC system, a significant improvement in sensitivity (up to ∼12-fold) has been obtained over previous studies. This has allowed for the first time a “real-world” head-to-head comparison of SFC to HPLC for impurity profiling of pharmaceutical products in a regulated environment. Retention time reproducibility and low level impurity detection were found to be comparable to reversed phase liquid chromatography (RPLC), that is, single digit %relative standard deviations (RSDs) were obtained for impurities present at less than 0.1 area%. Furthermore, these results were obtained with drug loading levels (≤2 mg/mL) that are not only comparable to those employed with HPLC, but are dictated by the limited solubility of many drug candidates. The elution of impurities was generally found to be orthogonal to that obtained with RPLC, but it was still challenging to find SFC conditions that would separate all of the components in the mixtures studied. In terms of enhancing selectivity, small amounts of mobile phase additives (0.1-1%) and temperature optimization were found to have a greater impact in SFC method development versus RPLC. However, unlike gradient RPLC, the relative changes in baseline noise and slope were found to be a complex function of the experimental conditions, with the largest differences in noise levels being generally observed for the widest and steepest gradients. It is likely that this gradient related noise is more apparent now because other sources of noise in SFC have been reduced significantly.