NMR in the Pharmaceutical and Biomedical areas for identification and quantification of drugs and metabolomics applications

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is probably, with mass spectrometry, the most powerful analytical tool for the structural determination of organic compounds. For a long time and due to technical limitations, the main applications of NMR were focused on chemistry (organic, inorganic and medicinal chemistry) or biochemistry (i.e. proteins and proteins ligands analysis). Indeed, despite of very interesting potential in terms of structural information, reproducibility, specificity, quantification, NMR suffered of a lack of sensitivity and sometime of resolution in the case of complex mixture analysis in comparison with other technics. However, since several years, important technical improvements such as huge increase in sensitivity, hyphenation of NMR with LC system, automation and development of 2D and presaturation sequences have opened new putative applications for NMR, specifically in the pharmaceutical and biomedical areas. Then, beside the mass and chromatographic technics classically used for drug analysis, NMR represents an interesting and complementary tool for many applications.
In this presentation, we will describe some NMR applications related to the pharma area. Starting from the identification of xenobiotic metabolites by coupling LC-SPE-NMR data with LC-MS/MS results, quantification of cyclodextrines in complex media, identification of illicit compounds, we will finish with our recent metabolomics NMR developments.