Future of Liquid Chromatography

Robert Plumb and Jeffrey R Mazzeo at Waters outline the crucial factors for choosing a new liquid chromatography platform

Analytical laboratories face the continual challenge of balancing investment in new technology – to improve throughput and performance – with the need to run existing methods and tests to support current production. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is one of these key analytical technologies that has become a major tool for food safety testing, life science studies, and pharmaceutical, environmental and chemical analysis.

• In the pharmaceutical industry, HPLC is employed throughout the whole drug analysis process, including drug discovery screening, raw material analysis, impurity profiling, stability studies, pharmacokinetic studies and final product testing.
• HPLC has found great application in the environmental and chemical analysis arena, where it has been employed for testing water quality, soil samples and product quality.
• Food safety analysis has also benefited from the capabilities of HPLC either alone or in combination with mass spectrometry (MS), allowing food to be rapidly assessed for contaminants such as pesticides or veterinary drugs.

The popularity of liquid chromatography is due to its speed of analysis, compatibility with samples to be analysed, ease-ofuse, simple interfacing with a wide range of detectors (optical, electrochemical, radiochemical, evaporative light scattering, NMR and MS), wide range of stationary phases, high resolving power and easy scale-up to preparative chromatography.

Over the last two years, several instrument manufacturers have introduced liquid chromatography systems that are designed to take advantage of columns packed with smaller particles. Compared to traditional LCs, these instruments are capable of higher pressure operation, have reduced system volumes, use faster autosamplers and employ detectors with much higher data capture rates. All of these elements are required to leverage the benefits of higher resolution, sensitivity and throughput offered by columns packed with smaller particles. R&D and method development laboratories have extensively adopted these new LC platforms, as they greatly improve the efficiency of product development.