Frank Riley, Pfizer, Groton, CT
Synthetic chemistry groups can produce a large number of compounds per year, putting a significant time pressure on support lines to avoid bottlenecks in method development and purification of compounds. The typical approach to development is chiral stationary phase (CSP) selectivity screening for a given sample followed by optimization of promising systems. This approach is efficient in terms of human effort, but incurs a cost in terms of instrument and compound time. In addition, when compounds are found to be problematic for the standard CSPs, considerable time can be spent investigating alternative systems. If a process can be used to target given selectivities in advance, initial screens can be tailored to the compound in question based on appropriate structural queries, increasing the probability of success initially.