Preparative chromatography in a pharmaceutical discovery laboratory: The need for speed

ANYL 370

Matt Potter, mpotter@amgen.com and Larry Miller. Amgen, One Kendall Square, Bldg 1000, Cambridge, MA 02139
It can take up to ten years to move a drug from discovery to a marketed product. Pharmaceutical companies are working in all phases of drug discovery and development to reduce these timelines. During drug discovery hundreds to thousands of analogs are synthesized for testing for each project. Each of these analogs needs to be purified to sufficient purity for testing. The technique used for most of these purifications is preparative chromatography. Purification is often a bottleneck in moving a project from discovery into development.

This talk will discuss the approaches employed in Amgen's discovery laboratories to reduce the time required for chromatographic purification. These approaches include open access purification equipment for use by medicinal chemists and specialized equipment (mass directed purification, prep HPLC and prep SFC) used by separation specialists. Multiple examples of these techniques will be presented, and a comparison of these approaches vs. previous approaches will be discussed.