ABSTRACT
In addition, early characterization of potentially active or toxic metabolites can direct a program to more potent and safe recommendation candidates. This article provides an overview of the value that early metabolite identification studies can give to a discovery program. It is possible in drug discovery to obtain an early look at the human metabolism of drug candidates through in vitro systems such as microsomes, hepatocytes, S9 fractions, and liver slices. The precursor and constant neutral loss experiments can be performed within the Liquid chromatography (LC) timeframe required for metabolite identification experiments. The contributions of metabolite identification studies to early drug discovery are often significant. However, only in recent years, with the considerable hardware and software advances in the use of LC-mass spectrometer (MS)/ MS technology, it has been realistic to implement these types of studies into the high throughput environment of drug discovery.
