Recent Applications of Chiral Capillary Electrophoresis in Pharmaceutical Analysis

Chirality has a big impact on drug analysis due to the different biological activities that enantiomers may have and the tendency to commercialize drugs as pure enantiomers. A great variety of chiral selectors have been employed for the enantiomeric separation of drugs by Chiral capillary electrophoresis (CCE). Macrocyclic antibiotics are powerful chiral selectors. They exhibit a variety of interaction types with analytes, such as electrostatic, dipole-dipole, hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen bonding and inclusion, due to the diversity in chemical groups and their macrocyclic structure. Polysaccharides are another important type of chiral selectors used for the separation of the enantiomers of chiral drugs. Among them, maltodextrins (MDs) have good structural characteristics, which make them suitable for chiral recognition. Sulfated cyclofructans (CF) showed exceptional selectivity toward many cationic analytes. Chiral drugs can be marketed as racemic mixtures or as pure enantiomers although in the last few years, there was a tendency to commercialize chiral drugs as pure enantiomers.