High-performance displacement chromatography of corticosteroids

Csaba Horváth and preparative liquid chromatography

Few chromatographers have been interested in furthering preparative liquid chromatography. The pioneers, Tswett, Kuhn and Lederer, A.J.P. Martin, Tiselius, isolated fractions but as an intermediate step in the analysis of their samples. The progress in electronics and sensors, and in their miniaturization has lead to the paradoxical situation that the analysts never see the transient pure fractions that their detector quantitates. Yet, over the last 25 years, preparative liquid chromatography has become an important industrial process for the separation, the extraction, and/or the purification of many pharmaceuticals or pharmaceutical intermediates, including pure enantiomers, purified peptides and proteins, compounds that are manufactured at the relatively large industrial scale of a few kilograms to several hundred tons per year. This development that has strongly affected the modem pharmaceutical industry is mainly due to the pioneering work of Csaba Horváth. His work in preparative HPLC was critical at both the practical and the theoretical levels. He was the first scientist in modem times to pay serious attention to the relationships between the curvature of the equilibrium isotherms, the competitive nature of nonlinear isotherms, and the chromatographic band profiles of complex mixtures. The thermodynamics of multi-component phase equilibria and mass transfer kinetics in chromatography attracted his interest and were the focus of ground-breaking contributions. He investigated displacement chromatography, an old method invented by Tiselius that Csaba was first to implement in HPLC. This choice was explained by the essential characteristic of displacement chromatography, in that it delivers fractions that can be far more concentrated than the feed. Remarkably, once the basics of nonlinear chromatography had been mastered in his group, most of the applications that were studied by his coworkers dealt with peptides of various sizes and with proteins. Thus, all the applications of preparative HPLC in the biotechnologies derive directly from Csaba's work. Although displacement did not pan out as a general method, the reasons are related more to practical constraints of the production of pharmaceuticals and to the long period of cheap energy that might be ending now. This report reviews Csaba's work in nonlinear chromatography.

Optimization of parameters of high-performance displacement chromatography for separation of soybean phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine

Hundred milligrams of soybean phospholipids were successfully separated by using high-performance displacement chromatography (HPDC) on a 150mm x 4.6mm analytical silica column (3-5 microm packings) with dichloromethane-methanol (9:1, v/v) as carrier and ethanolamine as displacer. From the viewpoint of preparative separation, the effects of loading amount, concentration and flow-rate of displacer on separation efficiency were investigated using throughput and recovery as indices. The parameters were optimized by orthogonal test design and statistical analysis method. Under the optimum conditions, namely displacer concentration being 167 mM, the flow-rate of displacer at 0.2 ml/min and concentration of sample being 211 mg/ml (factual loading amount 211 mg/ml x 0.7 ml = 148 mg), the purity, throughput and recovery of obtained soybean phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) and phosphatidylcholine (PC) were 80.2%, 65.7 mg/h, 70.9% and 90.5%, 272.6 mg/h, 88.3%, respectively. In addition, selections of regenerant and appropriate regeneration condition were also studied.

Separation of phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine by using high-performance displacement chromatography

A binary mixture of phosphatidylcholine (PC) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) was successfully separated by high-performance displacement chromatography (HPDC) on an 150 mm x 4.6 mm analytical silica column (3-5 microm packing), using dichloromethane-methanol (9:1, v/v) as carrier and ethanolamine as displacer. The effects of displacer concentration, flow-rate, loading amount and the composition of the sample on separation efficiency were studied. Eighty-four milligrams sample (PE:PC 1:1.16) was separated perfectly by using 83 mM ethanolamine (in carrier) as displacer at the flow-rate of 0.1 ml/min. The yields of the pure PE and PC (100% purity) were 94.8% and 87.9%, respectively and the cycle time for a single separation was about 195 min. It was valuable that the optimum loading amount (the allowed maximum of sample loading) was investigated only by using the sample to be simulated the composition of the separated actual one, because the separation efficiency was significantly affected by the composition of the sample. For the same loading amount of 175 mg, the yields of the pure PE and PC were improved greatly from 31.4 and 16.9 to 56.0 and 77.6%, respectively, when the proportion of PE to PC was adjusted from 1:1.16 to 1:4. Furthermore, the separation of PE and PC in an actual sample (soybean phospholipids) was achieved using the proposed HPDC method.

Chromatographic purification of some 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors

The purification of pravastatin, simvastatin and lovastatin in the sodium salt or lactone form and of mevastatin in the lactone form by reversed-phase displacement chromatography is presented. The mobile phases consisted of water or mixtures of water-methanol and water-acetonitrile. Six different displacers were successfully used. Up to 0.14 g of raw sample per gram of stationary phase was loaded on a column packed with silica-based octadecyl phase. Crude substances from 85 to 88% chromatographic purity were purified and at least 99.5% purity was achieved.

Preparative purification of peptides by reversed-phase chromatography. Sample displacement mode versus gradient elution mode

In this study, we describe a novel method of preparative liquid chromatography, applicable to analytical columns and instrumentation, where the reversed-phase column is operated in sample displacement mode (SDM). This technique takes advantage of the different relative hydrophobicities of components of a sample mixture, so that when a column is optimally loaded with an aqueous solution of the sample mixture, there is competition among the sample components for the adsorption sites on the hydrophobic stationary phase. The more hydrophobic components compete more successfully for these sites than more hydrophilic components, which are displaced and immediately eluted from the column. Thus, the major separation takes place in water. Subsequent treatment with an aqueous organic eluent is only required to wash retained components off the column and takes no part in the major separation process. A two-column (precolumn and main column, in series) SDM strategy was applied to the preparative purification of a peptide product from neighbouring hydrophilic and hydrophobic impurities. Hydrophobic impurities were isolated on a shorter precolumn trap while hydrophilic impurities were displaced from the main column in the aqueous mobile phase (0.05% aq. trifluoroacetic acid), leaving the main column filled with homogeneous product. Gradient elution was then used to remove the peptide product from the main column. The researcher can regulate the size of the precolumn trap depending on the amount of hydrophobic impurities in a particular sample, or the size of the main column depending on the amount of product desired. The simplicity and flexibility of the SDM approach to preparative-scale purification enabled rapid separation of a single peptide component from a complex multicomponent mixture and should prove to be valuable for researchers in the peptide/protein field.

Tandem separation schemes for preparative high-performance liquid chromatography of proteins

Preparative chromatography of protein mixtures was carried out by tandem separation schemes involving frontal chromatography followed by stepwise desorption or displacement. In this way, with columns and instruments generally employed in analytical high-performance liquid chromatography, proteins could be purified in quantities similar to those typically separated by a preparative-scale system. A mixture of beta-lactoglobulin A and B was loaded onto an anion-exchange column, and, in the process, a large fraction of the less-retained beta-lactoglobulin B was recovered in pure form. The column was then flushed with the carrier, and subsequent desorption of the substances bound on the stationary phase was carried out by single-step desorption, two-step desorption, or displacement. With this mixture, the last two methods yielded approximately the same results in terms of the amount of product obtained per unit column volume. Whereas stepwise desorption is a simpler technique than displacement, the latter is required for the separation of components having similar adsorption behavior. In another set of experiments, a protein mixture obtained by heat treatment of human growth hormone was fractionated on a reversed-phase column. After loading the column by frontal chromatography, which separated a large fraction of the main product from the other components retained by the column, four desorption steps were applied to recover the individual components. These separation schemes offer an approach to preparative chromatography of proteins that is superior to conventional linear elution in terms of column load capacity, low mobile phase consumption, simultaneous separation and concentration, as well as enrichment of trace components.

Displacement chromatography of biomolecules

Displacement chromatography was used for the preparative-scale separation of peptides, antibiotics, and proteins. The feed components were both purified and concentrated during the separation processes. The components of a peptide mixture were separated on a reverse-phase analytical column using 2-(2-butoxyethoxy) ethanol as the displacer. The use of organic modifiers in the carrier along with an elevated column temperature of 45 degrees C enabled the efficient separation of relatively hydrophobic peptides by displacement chromatography. In addition, the throughput of the process was significantly increased by carrying out the separation at an elevated flow-rate with no adverse effect on product purity. The antibiotic cephalosporin C was isolated from impurities in a fermentation broth using 2-(2-butoxyethoxy)ethanol as the displacer along with a step change in column temperature. The proteins cytochrome c and lysozyme were purified on a weak cation-exchanger column using cationic polymers as the displacers. While polymers of 60 and 20 kilodaltons were both found to be good displacers for these proteins, only the lower molecular weight polymer was readily removed from the column by standard regeneration techniques.

Displacement chromatography of oligomycins

Oligomycins A, B and C were separated by reversed-phase chromatography in the displacement mode on octadecylsilica columns. The carrier was a mixture of methanol and water and a saturated solution of palmitic acid in the carrier served as the displacer. The production rate was investigated as a function of the chromatographic conditions, i.e., methanol concentration in the carrier, displacer concentration, flow-rate and the amount and concentration of the oligomycin mixture in the feed solution. A practical guide for method development is given.