Reading Scientific Services Ltd has commissioned a new nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer in its Berkshire laboratories. The new instrument enhances the analytical capability of RSSL, and is more sensitive and more flexible than the company's existing NMR instrument.
NMR is a powerful technique that has applications in determining the elemental composition and structure of chemical compounds. RSSL Pharma uses NMR in the identification of unknown compounds such as metabolites or drug degradation products. It may also be used for impurity profiling or determining a drug's optical purity, and increasingly, has a crucial role to play in the detection and identification of counterfeit drug products. NMR can also be used for rapid screening of complex mixtures, and to differentiate between the chemical composition of different formulations, or to provide evidence that a product meets its specification.
Since pharmaceuticals are generally composed of relatively few chemical elements (largely hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, as well as the halogens and sometimes metals), most of these have one or more isotopes that may be detected by NMR experiments. However, due to low natural abundance and/or low relative sensitivity, the focus is usually on hydrogen (1H), carbon (13C), fluorine (19F) and phosphorus (31P).