Therapeutic drug monitoring in patients with chronic renal failure: evaluation of the Abbott TDx drug assay system.

Immunoassay techniques have been widely used for therapeutic drug monitoring, but lack of antibody specificity can lead to measurement of erroneous drug concentrations due to cross-reactivity with other drugs, metabolites, or endogenous substances, particularly in patients with excretory organ compromise such as renal dysfunction. The Abbott TDx system, a popular automated immunoassay method for therapeutic drug monitoring, was used to measure apparent serum concentrations of carbamazepine, digoxin, gentamicin, lidocaine, phenobarbital, phenytoin, quinidine, valproic acid, and vancomycin in patients with renal failure who were not receiving these drugs. Endogenous substances and other concomitantly administered drugs did not lead to spuriously elevated drug levels, and a previous report of cross-reactive digoxin-like substances was not confirmed. Pooled plasma samples from the patients were spiked with digoxin or phenytoin, each at two concentrations, and the samples were assayed for the drug concentration using the TDx system. No falsely elevated values were found. This work suggests that the TDx system may be better suited for the measurement of these drugs in patients with renal failure than some other immunoassay methods.

A readily obtainable analog of propranolol suitable for use as internal standard in chromatographic assays for propranolol.

There appears to be a need for a readily and conveniently available close chemical analog of propranolol suitable for use as internal standard in a variety of chromatographic assays of the drug. With this purpose in mind, we developed a simple procedure for the preparation of N-cyclopentyldesisopropylpropranolol. The commercially available and inexpensive starting materials are mixed in a flask and after 48 hr at room temperature the precipitated product is filtered off. Mass spectrometry, melting point determinations, and elemental analysis were used to characterize the product. N-cyclopentyldesisopropylpropranolol was used as internal standard in a liquid-chromatographic assay of ten replicate 50 ng/ml propranolol plasma samples, and gave a coefficient of variation of 3.4%.

Improved procedure for determination of flucytosine in human blood plasma by high-pressure liquid chromatography.

Several high-pressure liquid chromatography procedures for the determination of flucytosine in serum or plasma have appeared. Some of these suffer from significant disadvantages, and none was applicable in our routine clinical therapeutic-drug-monitoring laboratory. A new high-pressure liquid chromatography assay for flucytosine was therefore developed. A 100-microliter sample of plasma was treated with an aqueous 5-iodocytosine internal-standard solution, and the mixture was deproteinized with trichloroacetic acid. A portion of the protein-free supernatant was diluted with 0.1 M ammonium phosphate, and an aliquot of the resulting solution was injected into the high-pressure liquid chromatography system. Chromatography was performed on a strong-cation-exchange column with a mobile phase containing aqueous ammonium phosphate, phosphoric acid, methanol, and acetonitrile. Detection was at 254 nm. The assay was shown to be linear in the 10 to 200-micrograms/ml drug-concentration range. Forty other drugs were tested for potential interference with the assay, and none was found. For routine use, a single-point working standard containing 75 micrograms of flucytosine per ml was used, giving intraassay coefficients of variation at 50 and 150 micrograms/ml of 1.8 and 2.3% respectively, whereas the day-to-day coefficient of variation at 50 micrograms/ml was 10.0%. Advantages of the procedure include the small sample size, the use of a convenient and reliable internal standard, speed, and simplicity. The assay is highly suitable for routine clinical drug-analysis laboratories.