Catherine Gharbaoui Email Address

Scientist and Contractor

Retrophin is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of drugs for the treatment of catastrophic diseases that are debilitating and often life-threatening, and for which there are currently limited patient options.

I always loved to solve puzzles and that is probably what drew me to structure elucidation using 2D NMR while doing my postdoc at Florida State University on Taxol analogs. Later, while working in pharmaceutical companies, I expanded my knowledge in NMR using automated flow NMR, and capillary NMR as well as other techniques like HPLC and LCMS. More recently, I had the opportunity to work in Analytical Development in addition to support chemistry drug discovery. I continued to perform structure determination of APIs, impurities, metabolites, and unknowns. In addition, I became the drug substance preformulation expert managing solubility, solution stability and forced degradation studies for NDA submission. My role also included the management of all CoAs analytical testing for reference standards, retention markers, and APIs, the review of release and stability data of our API campaigns and our internal GLP studies. I also performed method validation for API analytical methods, reviewed general test methods, instrumentation methods and SOPs, and collaborated with CROs on various projects (API manufacturing campaigns, metabolites synthesis, salt and polymorph screening). Key areas: Drug substance, structure elucidation, solubility, forced degradation, release testing and stability review, excipient-API compatibility, analytical method development. Techniques: 1D and 2D NMR, HPLC, LCMS, GC, GCMS, KF, IC, DSC, TGA, XRPD.