PARALLEL TIME OF FLIGHT MASS SPECTROMETER

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Large compound libraries are being generated in pharmaceutical discovery applications, placing a growing burden on the analytical scientist to rapidly characterize these samples both at the gross scale for synthesis confirmation and in focused studies for more promising compounds. Exacerbating this throughput challenge, the purity of compounds generated fran multi-step synthetic organic reactions on polymeric beads is often compromised. In the absence of chromatographic separation, these impurities may lead to both false positives and false negatives in flow injection mass spectrometry (MS), depending upon the physio-chemical properties of the analyte, competing inter-mediate products and resin contributed impurities. Analytical groups with Ms responsibilities must therefore choose between (a) faster but less informative flow injection methods and (b) more reliable, but slower LC-MS methods. A method is proposed to deliver significantly increased Ms sample throughput, while at the same time addressing the need for high chemical selectivity which only LC-MS can deliver. Exploiting the characteristics of a specialized API time-of-flight mass spectrometer, multiple time-varying liquid streams will be simultaneously mass analyzed without resorting to flow switching or any other time-slice scheme. This new approach will allow multiple LC systems to be coupled to a single API-TOF-MS while maintaining research grade figures of merit. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: This apparatus will allow significantly greater numbers of these samples to be characterized via LC-MS, without deploying additional MS analyzers. Such an instrument would find immediate utility in those high throughput screening applications which are presently bottle-necked by serial sample introduction to analytical instruments. Less a research tool than an automation tool, such an instruments would be ideally suited for automated, high speed, LC-MS in quality control and manufacturing operations.