NMR spectroscopy in pharmacy

Since drugs in clinical use are mostly synthetic or natural products, NMR spectroscopy has been mainly used for the elucidation and confirmation of structures. For the last decade, NMR methods have been introduced to quantitative analysis in order to determine the impurity profile of a drug, to characterise the composition of drug products, and to investigate metabolites of drugs in body fluids. For pharmaceutical technologists, solid state measurements can provide information about polymorphism of drug powders, conformation of drugs in tablets etc. Micro-imaging can be used to study the dissolution of tablets, and whole-body imaging is a powerful tool in clinical diagnostics. Taken together, this review covers applications of NMR spectroscopy in drug analysis, in particular, methods of international pharmacopoeiae, pharmaceutics and pharmacokinetics. The authors have repeated many of the methods described in their own laboratories. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.