Debugging Drug Discovery
Snotnose writes:
I suspect most of us are software engineers with our own stories of tracking down gnarly bugs. Have you ever thought of debugging other processes like, say, drug discovery? Here is the story of tracking down an impurity in a new drug
Here's a recent paper illustrating an impurity problem that I'll bet none of us out there have experienced! It describes process work on an antifungal molecule, efinaconazole, which is now available as a generic drug. The authors were checking the purity of various batches of the final product and kept noticing a small peak shouldering the desired one under LC conditions. They estimated it at about 0.06% of the samples (it showed up every time!) and eluted just a bit faster than the real drug.
This of course needed to be tracked down. The standard is generally 0.15% for a known impurity (one whose structure and properties have previously been worked out) and 0.10% for unknown ones. And this peak was getting too close to that cutoff - there were no guarantees that whatever-it-was might not come in across the threshold at some point, for some reason, and cause some real problems. Plus, just what was it anyway? Making sure of the structure could allow a switch to the 0.15% standard eventually.
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