Technical Note – Approaches to chiral products: Racemic resolution

The importance of enantiomeric purity in pharmaceutical products is widely known, something humanity learnt the hard way. Unfortunately, obtaining enantiopure compounds can sometimes be very expensive, becoming a burden during drug development.

Different approaches are available to obtain the desired enantiomer of a drug, all of them with advantages and drawbacks depending on the nature and properties of the parent species. In the case of natural products, one can rely on extraction from the natural source, somewhat impractical when working at large scale. Another option is the synthesis of enantiopure compounds by asymmetric methods, which sometimes are not optimized enough. And last but not least is the topic of our latest Technical Note, the resolution of racemic mixtures. Read on to learn about the work we carried out to provide a comprehensive solution for the enantiomeric enrichment of a promising pre-clinical candidate.