Critical review of reports on impurity and degradation product profiling in the last decade

The aim of this review is to characterise the state-of-art in the field of impurity and degradation profiling of drugs based on papers published in the last decade. The separation and determination of impurities and degradants with a known structure are discussed, but emphasis is placed on the structure elucidation and determination of new (unknown) impurities and degradation products by off-line and on-line chromatographic-spectroscopic methods. The analytical aspects of enantiomeric purity of chiral drugs are also discussed.