Development of a novel high-throughput analytical methodology, multiple injection method, for quantitative analysis in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies using liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry.

In this study, we developed a novel methodology, multiple injection method (MIM), for higher-throughput screening of compounds by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). MIM involves continuous injections of multiple samples containing a different compound respectively into the column, and then temporarily trapping of analytes at the column head in high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) system. This is followed by elution of all the compounds from the column and detection of them by MS/MS. In this study, fexofenadine, verapamil, risperidone, ondansetron, and imipramine were used as model compounds to investigate the effectiveness of MIM in pharmacokinetic studies. Analytical time of validation samples of these model compounds could be shortened to one third by MIM, compared with the conventional method. In addition, both the accuracy and precision of MIM met the general criteria for quantitative analysis. The peak intensity was found to be unaffected by overlapping compounds even if they have wide range of ionization efficiency. As a result of the comparison of MIM and conventional method in the analysis of samples in pharmacokinetic studies using model compounds, no difference was shown in the quantification values. Consequently, this method has some advantages, reduction of analytical time, the improvement of sensitivity, and the simplicity of system, compared to the conventional methods. MIM should be very useful and powerful method for drug development without an additional hardware and can be used for the measurement of compounds in biological samples for pharmacokinetic studies, especially it greatly contributes to accelerating drug development in its discovery stages.