Development of SPME method for concomitant sample preparation of rocuronium bromide and tranexamic acid in plasma

• High throughput method for analysis of rocuronium and tranexamic acid was developed.
• Contrary to existing protocols no matrix modification was applied.
• Overall time of sample preparation: 22 s/sample.
• Method was applied for samples from patients underwent liver transplantation.
• Simplicity of the protocol gives potential for on-site use in hospital.

A high-throughput method using solid-phase microextraction coupled to liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (SPME-LC–MS/MS) for determination of tranexamic acid and rocuronium bromide in human plasma was developed and validated. Standard analytical approaches employ acidification of the sample due to the instability of rocuronium bromide in collected plasma samples. However, acidification affects the binding equilibrium of the drug and consequently no information on the free/bound concentration can be obtained. Contrary to these protocols, the proposed method requires minimum sample handling and no ion pairing and/or derivatization procedure. A weak cation exchange coating was chosen as the best extracting phase for selected drugs, guaranteed a good recovery, minimum carry-over, reusability and reproducibility. SPME procedure met all Food and Drug Administration acceptance criteria for bioanalytical assays at three concentration levels, for both selected drugs. Post-extraction addition experiments showed that matrix effect was less than ±3%. Here, a weak cation exchange thin-film solid-phase microextraction (WCX TF-SPME) approach is presented, offering effective cleanup procedure and full quantitation of the drugs in plasma, undoubtedly one the most challenging matrices with regards to its complexity. In addition, the 96-well plate format of WCX TF-SPME system provides considerable advantages, such as high throughput analysis for up to 96 samples in 35 min (22 s/sample), requirement of small amounts of plasma samples (0.8 mL), and a simple sample preparation protocol, all of which shows a promise for possible on-site application in hospitals to monitor concentrations of the drugs in close to real time.

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