A revolution in drug discovery is unfolding in the form of high throughput organic synthesis by parallel and combinatorial methods. Methods of conducting rapid screening for biological activity are keeping pace with the rapid growth of combinatorial libraries. The current limitation in fully characterizing these libraries is in the chemical analysis of purity and component composition. The currently accepted standard for high throughput analysis is liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). With a cycle time of about 5 minutes, an LC/MS instrument can analyze about 300 samples in a 24-hour period. We propose an innovative MS concept that reduces cycle time to about 5 seconds, thus raising the potential analysis rate to greater than 10,000 samples/day. The innovation is based on a novel ionization source that (1) ionizes nearly all drug candidates efficiently, (2) leads to nearly pure parent molecular ion for definitive analysis of complex mixtures, and (3) is immune to detection of common air constituents and many commonly used solvents. Our market research indicates the potential for exponential growth on the basis of quick penetration of the chemical analysis niche of the rapidly growing field of combinatorial and parallel synthesis methods for drug discovery. The proposed high throughput chemical analysis system has the potential to dominate the market for combinatorial library analysis, which is a rapidly growing field of drug discovery. Our real-time, complex mixture analyzers will also be marketed for applications in drug testing, environmental monitoring, and on-line process monitoring.
