A liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for simultaneous quantification of thirty-nine tyrosine kinase inhibitors in human plasma

Currently, the use of targeted drugs such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) plays an important role in clinical therapy. As the number of approved TKIs continues to increase, existing analysis methods will not be able to meet the growing needs, and will hamper the development of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of TKIs. Based on LC-MS/MS technology, this study tends to develop and validate a multi-component analysis method for simul-taneous determination of the concentrations of 39 TKIs in plasma. Spiked plasma was blended with isotope labelled internal standards, and injected into the LC-MS/MS system after protein precipitation by acetonitrile. Chromatographic separation was achieved using an ODS-4 column with gradient elution of formic acid/water (1:1000; v/v) and acetonitrile. Analytes detection was conducted in positive ionisation mode using MRM. The total run time was 8 min. The method validation was conducted by assessing the following parameters: selec-tivity, linearity and the lower limit of qualification, accuracy and precision, stability, matrix effect and recovery. The concentrations of 39 TKIs showed good linearity within the range of their respective standard curves in plasma, the accuracy of all quality control samples ranged from 85.9% to 114.1%, and the precision was lower than 13.3%. The extraction recovery ranged from 92.6% to 114.7%, and the matrix effect of plasma was lower than 11.3%. This new method was successfully developed, can be used for the determination of drug concen-trations in multiple patients with different kinds of TKIs, and will therefore be suitable for TDM of 39 TKIs.