Case 1998-601
BACKGROUND
Enantioseparations are becoming increasingly important because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has declared if a drug is chiral, the biological effects of both enantiomers must be determined. Many procedures for resolutions of D, L-amino acids have been documented on an analytical scale. The limitations of these methods is generally the economic cost, in addition to the difficulty of being scaled up.
INNOVATION
Researchers at UCLA have developed a new chiral recognition polymer that has the following advantages: 1. Direct separation of free amino acids. 2. Usable for both analytical and preparative purposes. 3. Uses aqueous solutions and alcohol; no buffer solutions are needed. 4. Easy scale-up. 5. A large chiral recognition capacity compared to natural biopolymers, such as Human Serum Albumin (HSA) and Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA). 6. Reusable. 7. Can be used as a chiral sensor. 8. Potential for adaptation for pharmaceutical separations.This new polymer strongly interacts with one enantiomeric form of an amino acid or component in a racemic mixture enabling chiral separations. An efficient way of employing the polymer to separate enantiomers of amino acids is by the use of a column containing a high-surface-area of the polymer. Experimental data has shown a separation factor of alpha = 8.4 for dl-phenylalanine using a 250mm column. Since alpha > 2 is considered to be potentially useful commercially, alpha of 8.4 is remarkable.