Simultaneous determination for oxicam non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in human serum by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

A high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) technique was developed for the simultaneous determination of five non-steroidal anti-inflammatory oxicam drugs (ampiroxicam, tenoxicam, piroxicam, meloxicam and lornoxicam) in human plasma. These five oxicam drugs and isoxicam (internal standard) were extracted from human plasma with an Oasis (R) MAX cartridge column and analysed on a Unison UK-C18 column (2.0 mm x 100 mm, 3 mu m) with an acetonitrile:10 mM formic ammonium buffer (pH 3.0) (50:50) mobile phase at 0.20 ml/min at 37 degrees C. The analytes were detected using a tandem mass spectrometer, equipped with an electrospray ion source (ESI). The instrument was used in multiple-reaction-monitoring (MRM) mode. The extraction yields from a 200 mu l human plasma sample (containing 10 ng of each drugs) with the Oasis (R) MAX cartridge column were 93.3-102.5%. The detection limits were 0.01-6.5 ng/ml (S/N = 3). Our developed method is very useful for the simultaneous determination of five oxicam (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory) drugs in human plasma by LC/MS/MS. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.