Applications of supercritical fluid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry in pharmaceuticals.

Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is a fully mature technique and can readily be coupled to mass spectrometers relatively easily. In the last years, supercritical fluid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (SFC-MS) has had a great advance in productivity, due to increase in reliability and robustness of both SFC and MS systems, the need to push drug discovery faster, and as a potential solution to old problems unsolved and new problems yet to be encountered. This article will illustrate the role of SFC-MS analysis in drug discovery process.

Optical chemical biosensors for high-throughput screening of drugs.

Optical biosensors have been commercially available since the early 1990s, and have been used extensively in many areas of research in the life sciences. Optical biosensors developed for drug analysis generally exploit the high selectivity of the antigen-antibody and drug-protein interaction. Optical biosensors can be made based on optical diffraction or electro-chemiluminescence.