The use of accurate mass measurement by orthogonal time-of-flight mass spectrometry in pharmaceuticals research

Allan Maccoll was the founding editor of Organic Mass Spectrometry, the first journal dedicated to the application of mass spectrometry to the analysis of organic structures, Many papers in OMS described the elucidation of structures from natural and synthetic sources. This is still a major application of mass spectrometry today, especially in those fine chemical industries such as Pharmaceuticals which depend on the discovery and development of organic compounds for a variety of applications. In this paper we describe the advances we have made in the last few years, especially utilising time-of-flight (ToF) mass spectrometers, to use accurate mass measurement to determine the structures of minor components contained within drug substance and degraded samples. The additional information obtained from accurate mass measurement is shown to be critical in assigning a particular structure in a number of examples.