Quantitation of adriamycin in plasma and urine: comparative study of radioimmunoassay and high-performance liquid...

The response of tumours to adriamycin, and the cardiotoxicity of the drug, may be related to its pharmacokinetics and plasma levels. Rapid and sensitive methods of adriamycin determination in plasma and urine samples are thus needed. A comparative study shows that high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorimetric detection is a reliable and specific method, but it is relatively slow and sometimes lacks sensitivity. A commercially-available radioimmunoassay kit is convenient, but there is a cross reaction with the major metabolise adriamycinol and unless the assay is combined with an extraction step, it gives erroneously high results.