In the last years, several countries and the United States have legalized either medical cannabis or marijuana for recreational scopes (or even both). These new regulations and laws have led to a revolution in the cannabis industry. As a result, industrial production has tremendously increased and, together with this, there has been an increasing demand for accurate potency testing of products (i.e., quantification of main cannabinoids present in the plant in terms of weight percentage) prior commercialization.<br/>However, research and development in this field have lagged behind for many years (mainly due to social and political restrictions), therefore there are many open points that need to find a solution soon. First of all, high-throughput analytical methods are needed to separate the largest number of cannabinoids in a single run. Nevertheless, this is a very difficult task complicated by several factors: i) novel cannabinoids are continuously discovered; ii) many cannabinoids have very similar structures therefore their separation is very challenging; iii) only 20% of currently discovered cannabinoids is available as certified reference material. Strictly connected to this last point, another emerging topic concerns the need for the developing of large-scale separation techniques for the purification of cannabinoids from complex matrices and for the preparation of analytical-grade standards. Finally, the last important aspect on which scientists have started shedding light is chirality of cannabinoids since many of them contain one or more asymmetric carbons. Production of cannabinoids by the plant has thought to be stereoselective for a long time, with (-)-<i>trans</i> forms preferentially synthesized. As a result, analytical methods employed to characterize cannabis products have been usually based only on achiral determination, irrespective of stereochemistry. Therefore, development of chiral chromatographic methods is another main priority, especially because in literature there are only few works [1-3].<br/>This communication will discuss these aspects by focusing on high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), which are becoming interesting alternative to gas chromatography (GC), the official method by European Pharmacopoeia [4]. Recent advancements and future challenges in this field will be also presented.

Perspectives and Pitfalls in Potency Testing of Cannabinoids by Liquid and Supercritical Fluid Chromatography

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ACS Fall 2022

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