Stress testing is
one of the most important parts of the drug development
process, helping to foresee stability problems and to identify degradation
products. One of the processes involving stress testing is represented
by forced degradation studies, which can predict the impact of certain
conditions of pH, moisture, heat, or other negative effects due to
transportation or packaging issues on drug potency and purity, ensuring
patient safety. Regulatory agencies have been working on a standardization
of laboratory procedures since the past two decades. One of the results
of those years of intensive research is the International Conference
on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines, which clearly define which forced
degradation studies should be performed on new drugs, which become
a routine work in pharmaceutical laboratories. Since used techniques
based on high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution
mass spectrometry have been developed years ago and are now mastered
by pharmaceutical scientists, automation of data analysis, and thus
data processing, is becoming a hot topic nowadays. In this work, we
present MassChemSite and WebChembase as a tandem to automatize the
routine analysis studies without missing information quality, using
as a case study the degradation of lansoprazole under acidic, oxidative,
basic, and neutral stress conditions.