High performance liquid chromatography for direct and indirect enantiomeric separations of chiral drugs

Conclusions

The final conclusion is that both the indirect and the direct separation methods provide various options to achieve separation and quantitation of enantiomers. Which of the two methods would be the best choice is greatly dependent on the chemical structure of the solute. For reasons of practice and reliability direct separation methods — if available — should be preferred over indirect methods. For biological samples an exhaustive clean-up step is required before a direct and/or indirect separation method can be used. For direct methods this clean-up step is the only way to prevent the expensive column from being damaged. For indirect methods the clean-up step may be less exhaustive depending on the kind of chiral derivatizing agent applied.