Development and validation of a reverse-phase HPLC method for quantification of gemcitabine in plasma samples of...

Gemcitabine is a cytidine analogue administered intravenously for treatment of many solid tumors like lung, pancreatic, biliary, non-small cell lung carcinoma and bladder carcinoma. The drug exhibits a short half-life of around 8-15 min due to its rapid inactivation by enzyme cytidine deaminase (CDA), making pharmacokinetic monitoring scientifically valuable and technically demanding. A validated, reproducible and clinically implementable method for plasma gemcitabine monitoring is therefore needed to support safe and effective chemotherapy delivery.

To develop and validate a reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method for gemcitabine quantification in human plasma from solid tumor patients receiving gemcitabine-based chemotherapy.

Plasma samples were processed by protein precipitation using 70% perchlorate with cytarabine internal standard (IS). Purospher® STAR C18 endcapped column was used (125 × 4 mm, 5μm) for chromatographic separation using an isocratic mobile phase of 0.01 M ammonium acetate (pH 6.0) and acetonitrile (98:2 v/v) at flow rate of 0.5 mL/min and UV detection at 268 nm (Neng-ming et al., 2004; Lafazanis et al., 2024 [21,22]). The method was validated as per ICH Q2(R1) guidelines, with additional parameters assessed as per ICH Q2(R2).

The mean retention time of gemcitabine was 10.976 ± 0.038 min (CV = 0.35%). The calibration curve was linear from 0.43 to 110 μg/mL (R² = 1.00). Accuracy was 98.3%, intraday precision (%RSD) ranged from 0.61 to 11.01%. Gemcitabine was stable in plasma stored at -80^°C for at least six weeks. The validated method was applied to plasma samples from 14 patients with metastatic solid tumors.

The developed RP-HPLC method is simple, sensitive, specific, and reproducible which represents a more comprehensively validated implementation of established RP-HPLC principles for gemcitabine bioanalysis. This constitutes a practical and accessible tool for therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) and pharmacokinetic investigations in clinical oncology.