Immunochemical determination of lonidamine in rat tissues and blood serum

Lonidamine (LND) is an antitumor drug which interferes selectively with the energy metabolism of neoplastic cell. Because of its physico-chemical properties, LND determination with conventional methods, i.e. high performance liquid chromatography and spectrofluorimetry, gives rise to several problems: LND is a lipotropic drug which becomes intimately associated with biological membranes so that it is impossible to extract all the drug bound, thus leading to an underestimation of the LND content in cells and tissues. These difficulties can be overcome by the immunoenzymatic method described here. The assay is simple, rapid, practical, highly sensitive (2-5 ng/ml) and particularly suitable for the analysis of multiple samples (twelve samples in triplicate for each plate). There is, moreover, a great improvement in data reproducibility.