Development of a method to determine axitinib, lapatinib and afatinib in plasma by micellar liquid chromatography and validation by the European Medicines Agency guidelines

A method based on micellar liquid chromatography to quantify the tyrosine kinase inhibitors axitinib, lapatinib and afatinib in plasma is reported. The sample pretreatment was a simple 1/5-dilution in a pure micellar solution, filtration and direct injection, without requiring extraction or purification steps. The three drugs were resolved from the matrix in 17 min, using an aqueous solution of 0.07 M sodium dodecyl sulfate - 6.0% 1-pentanol, buffered at pH 7 with 0.01 M phosphate salt as mobile phase, running under isocratic mode at 1 mL/min through a C18 column. The detection was performed by absorbance at 260 nm. An accurate mathematical relationship was established between the retention factor of each drug and the surfactant/organic solvent concentration in the mobile phase, achieved with a limited number of experiments, in order to optimize these factors. A binding behavior of the analytes face to the micelles was found out. The method was successfully validated by the guidelines of the European Medicines Agency in terms of: selectivity, linearity (r2 > 0.9995), calibration range (0.5 to 10 mg/L), limit of detection (0.2 mg/L), carry-over effect, accuracy (− 8.1 to + 6.9%), precision (< 13.8%), dilution integrity, matrix effect, stability and robustness. The procedure was found reliable, practical, economic, accessible, short-time, easy-to-handle, inexpensive, environmental-friendly, safe, useful for the analysis of many samples per day. Finally, the method was applied to the analysis of incurred, using quality control samples in the same analytical run, with adequate results. Therefore, it can be implementable for routine analysis in clinical laboratories.