CURRENT TRENDS IN MODERN PHARMACEUTICAL ANALYSIS FOR DRUG DISCOVERY

Pharmaceutical analysis methods are traditionally and commonly applied to the chemical analysis of drug molecules. However, in the last two decades, modern pharmaceutical analysis has evolved enormously, capitalizing on hyphenation techniques, high-throughput technologies, chemometrics, and most recently miniaturization and nanotechnology. The combination of various techniques allows the modern pharmaceutical analyst to exploit the virtues of each technique and, in turn, to improve the overall quality of analysis with reduced cost, analysis time, and sample volumes.

High-throughput technologies are having an increasingly important role in early-stage drug development in the frame of preclinical and clinical ADME (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion) studies.chemometric methods applied in the domain of computer-aided drug discovery, and which prove particularly successful in early stage preclinical research as a fast computational and analytical tool for screening the increasing numbers of potential drug candidates.

Recently, the interest in miniaturization technology has grown rapidly, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry where it has been fuelled by the need to speed-up the analysis in high-throughput screening applications which focused on “lab-on-a-chip” nanotechnology because of the potential to identify, study, and evaluate new drug entities. Nanotechnology will have an increasingly important role in the development of commercial analytical and preparative tools.

Keywords: Pharmaceutical analysis, Hyphenation techniques, High-throughput analysis, Chemometrics, Miniaturization, Nanotechnology.