Enantiomeric separations of illicit drugs and controlled substances using cyclofructan‐based (LARIHC) and cyclobond I 2000 RSP HPLC chiral stationary phases

Recently a novel class of chiral stationary phases (CSPs) based on cyclofructan (CF) has been developed. Cyclofructans are cyclic oligosaccharides that possess a crown ether core and pendent fructofuranose moieties. Herein, we evaluate the applicability of these novel CSPs for the enantiomeric separation of chiral illicit drugs and controlled substances directly without any derivatization. A set of 20 racemic compounds were used to evaluate these columns including 8 primary amines, 5 secondary amines, and 7 tertiary amines. Of the new cyclofructan‐based LARIHC columns, 14 enantiomeric separations were obtained including 7 baseline and 7 partial separations. The LARIHC CF6‐P column proved to be the most useful in separating illicit drugs and controlled substances accounting for 11 of the 14 optimized separations. The polar organic mode containing small amounts of methanol in acetonitrile was the most useful solvent system for the LARIHC CF6‐P CSP. Furthermore, the LARIHC CF7‐DMP CSP proved to be valuable for the separation of the tested chiral drugs resulting in four of the optimized enantiomeric separations, whereas the CF6‐RN did not yield any optimum separations. The broad selectivity of the LARIHC CF7‐DMP CSP is evident as it separated primary, secondary and tertiary amine containing chiral drugs. The compounds that were partially or un‐separated using the cyclofructan based columns were screened with a Cyclobond I 2000 RSP column. This CSP provided three baseline and six partial separations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.