Presented by Kaho Kwok of Northern Illinois University

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has become a technique of choice for analytical separations of pharmaceutical compounds. Throughout the years, detection techniques for HPLC such as UV absorption, refractive index, and mass spectrometry have become common. However, there are drawbacks in these detection techniques. For instance, since the response of these detectors usually varies with the chemical structure of the compound of interest, internal standards are required for each analyte in order to obtain accurate quantitative results. Because inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) rely on sample decomposition to convert analytes to atomic forms, such drawbacks can be minimized or eliminated. Sensitivity and selectivity can be enhanced by using ICP-MS as detector for pharmaceutical separations with HPLC. The analytical performance of our ICP-MS for non-metals (P, S, Cl, and F) detection will be presented. The performance of an HPLC system with ICP-MS detection for the separation of several pharmaceutical compounds containing non-metals will be presented. The ability to quantify impurities in these compounds with HPLC-ICP-MS will be discussed.