Development and application of a high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method to determine...

Despite the high potential offered by electrospray ionization on highly polar compounds like biphosphonates, few applications have been developed. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) separation methods suitable for such molecules cannot be used in tandem with mass spectrometry (MS) due to high non-volatile salt content; at the same time the sample preparation, in biological fluids, is also a challenging problem. In the past ion-pair chromatography was mainly used in the case of HPLC-MS of biphosphonates, but no application to quantitative pharmacokinetic (PK) studies has been presented. In this study, after preliminary tests with ion-pair chromatography showing a poor sensitivity, a combined derivatization of the amino group and the biphosphonate has been developed and tested in a PK study. Using this analytical approach we were able to fully validate the quantitation of alendronate in the range of 6.667-4860.0 ng/ml in urine (sample volume 2.0 ml); each analytical run was 5.0 min long. The sensitivity achieved permitted a correct evaluation of the alendronate urinary excretion over the full period of urine collection. Sample preparation despite its complexity permitted to process and analyze up to 200 samples in a working day.