Ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-MS/MS (UHPLC-MS/MS) in practice: analysis of drugs and pharmaceutical formulations

Background

UHPLC-MS/MS is connected in various research facilities for the qualitative and quantitative investigation of a pharmaceutical substance, pharmaceutical items, and biological specimen.

Main body

The commence review article is an endeavor to offer pervasive awareness around assorted aspects and details about the UHPLC-MS/MS and related techniques with the aim on practice to an estimation of medicinal active agents in the last 10 years. The article also focused on isolation, separation, and characterization of present impurity in drug and biological samples.

Conclusion

Review article compiles a general overview of medicinally important drugs and their analysis with UHPLC-MS/MS. It gives fundamental thought regarding applications of UHPLC-MS/MS for the study on safety limit. The summary of developed UHPLC-MS/MS methods gives a contribution to the future trend and limitations in this area of research.

Screening of herbal medicines for potential allopathic antidiabetic adulterants: An analytical study

Background:

There are several reports worldwide on adulteration of herbal medicines (HMs) with allopathic drugs. In India, only a few studies have reported adulteration of HMs with antidiabetics and there are no systematic studies.

Aims:

To develop a rapid and validated method for detection of allopathic antidiabetic adulterants and to explore the extent of adulteration in HMs sold in South India.

Materials and Methods:

Standards and solvents were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich. Different brands of antidiabetic HM samples with manufacturing licenses were procured from dispensaries. Spiked drug free psyllium husk as solid and flask seed oil as liquid herbal matrices were used for method development. The spiked matrices with different concentrations were extracted with methanol and subjected to centrifugation. The supernatant was collected and analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Isocratic elution was carried on a C18 column with 0.1% (v/v) formic acid:methanol (3:7, v/v) as a mobile phase. All drugs were monitored for two ion products in positive electrospray ionization mode using multiple reaction monitoring scans.

Results:

The retention time was 9 min. Limit of detection is 10 Pictograms (pg) for all analytes except for metformin, which was 370 pg. Recoveries of analytes range from 96% to 117%. Forty different brands of antidiabetic HMs were analyzed. Adulterant peaks were not observed in the mass chromatograms of HMs.

Conclusions:

A single-run method was developed by LC-MS/MS for the detection of proposed antidiabetics in HMs from licensed manufacturing units and online sold HMs across herbal dispensaries in Puducherry union territory, India. None of the HMs was found to be adulterated with proposed allopathic antidiabetic adulterants.

Simultaneous determination of glipizide and its four hydroxylated metabolites in human urine using LC-MS/MS and its application in urinary phenotype study

Cytochrome P450 (CYP) 2C9 and CYP2C19 genetic mutant could influence the plasma concentration of glipizide in human subjects, which refers to glipizide safety and adverse effects in clinic practice. A further study to investigate the relationship of the concentrations between glipizide and its metabolites in human with different CYP mutants was valuable. We firstly develop a validated liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method for simultaneous quantification of glipizide and its hydroxylated metabolites in human urine. After simple protein precipitation with methanol including 4'-OH-tolbutamide and gliclazide (both are internal standards), the analytes were chromatographed on a reversed-phased column with a mobile phase of 0.1% formic acid in acetonitrile and 0.1% formic acid in water by a gradient elution. The ion transitions of the precursor to the product ion were principally protonated ions [M+H]⁺ at m/z 446.4→m/z 321.1 for glipizide, m/z 462.2→m/z 321.1 for the four hydroxylated forms of glipizide, m/z 287.2→m/z 188.0 for 4'-OH-tolbutamide, and m/z 324.1→m/z 127.1 for gliclazide. The method was linear over a concentration range of 0.02-20.0ng/mL. The intraday and inter-day variances were less than 9.9%, and accuracy was within ±6.8%. The method was successfully applied to the urinary phenotyping study in volunteers after a single oral administration of 5-mg glipizide tablet, and two new hydroxycyclohexyl metabolites of glipizide (OH-gp), 4-cis-OH-gp and 3-trans-OH-gp, were found in this study.