Design of Rapid Gradient Methods for the Analysis of Combinatorial Chemistry Libraries and the Preparation of Pure Compounds

I. INTRODUCTION Automated synthesis has emerged as the dominant tool in the search for new lead compounds in the pharmaceutical industry [1]. The

speed with which new entities are synthesized challenges the techniques used to analyze the products of the synthesis. Fast structure identification tools such as mass spectrometry (MS) can rapidly identify the success of a synthesis, but do not provide sufficient information on the purity of a new entity. On the other hand, only a rapid separation technique such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) can be used to characterize the purity and homogeneity of a sample.