Analytical tools and chemometrics in drug development process: A review

Drug development is a time-consuming and costly process. Recently, the need of very sensitive and selective assays for the complete characterization of New Chemical Entities (NCE) has become very stringent. From Analytical Chemists, a partial answer to this problem was the development and validation of new methods that permit an improvement in terms of productivity (-high-throughput"), sensitivity and selectivity, especially using very recent hyphenated analytical assays, such as HPLC-MS/MS, GC-MS/MS or further complex couplings, that can provide more complete information in a single analysis. All data obtained by these novel techniques require a very deep and multifaceted analysis, in order to check the principal and fundamentals variables and to reject the others. In this scenario, chemometrics provide scientists with useful tools to interpret the large amounts of data generated by these complex analytical assays and allows for quality control, classification procedures, modelling studies. Discrimination between different molecules available as novel drugs and molecules having no interesting biological activities is easy by means of multivariate analysis. In this chapter we report recent advantages in analytical method hyphenation and chemometric approach applied to drug development.