Pharmaceutical Analysis

Hermann Wätzig Capillary electromigration techniques have been used for many years for the analysis of compounds of pharmaceutical interest ranging from small molecules to macromolecules. The development and application of analytical electromigration methods are no longer restricted to academic research groups but have found wide applications in the industry including their use in regulatory documentations. This also includes the use of electromigration methods in clinical and forensic laboratories. This Special Issue features the progress of electromigration techniques in pharmaceutical analysis. This topic was already treated in the earlier Special Issues of Electrophoresis 2006, 27(12), 2261–2526, Electrophoresis 2008, 29(17), 3489–3714, Electrophoresis 2012, 33(11), 1493–1684 and Electrophoresis 2015, 36(21-22), 2635–2850. Even if there were already impressive applications in these earlier volumes, capillary electrophoresis has substantially improved since then. Today, it is certainly one of the methods of choice for the analysis of macromolecules and biopharmaceuticals in particular, as well as for enantioseparations. With the large body of experience that has accumulated over the years the successful development and validation of methods have become straightforward. This special issue features impurity profiling of drugs in general and enantioseparations in particular, as well as clinical and forensic applications. One article also deals with charge variants of biopharmaceuticals. Sensitive methods for drug analysis have been developed using large volume stacking and micellar sweeping techniques. The advantages of the Quality by Design approach for method development are clearly shown. Two papers employ the capiticitively-coupled contactless conductivity detector, and molecular imprints are employed for solid-phase extraction. Electro-driven separations are compared to works using liquid chromatography, and the two works employ electrochromatography. The editors would like to thank all authors for their important contributions and all reviewers for their efforts and valuable comments on the manuscripts. Furthermore we acknowledge three conference series which supported us with synergy for this special issue: during CE Pharm 2017, HPLC 2017 and ITP 2017 we had numerous fruitful discussions about this topic, and we met several future authors during these conferences. In particular, we express our gratitude to Prof. Dr. Ziad El Rassi for the honorable opportunity to serve as Guest Editors for this Special Issue.