Expanding Antineoplastic Drugs Surface Monitoring Profiles: Enhancing of Zwitterionic Hydrophilic Interaction Methods

Abstract

Antineoplastic drugs are a wide and heterogeneous group of substances that, as universally known, can cause highly severe toxic effects to whoever is exposed. From an occupational safety point of view, surface contaminations inside preparation and administration units are a growing issue and therefore require the development and implementation of sensible and fast monitoring methods. The unlikelihood of a unique all-embracing chromatography, able to correctly retain and separate each analyte led to the need to create an orthogonal normal phase analysis, which might be able to fill the gaps in the more common reversed-phase ones. An existing hydrophilic interaction method has thus been expanded to 6 other drugs and applied to real samples after an evaluation of its performances. The experimental data were then used to evaluate the possibility of estimating reliable relationships between the chromatographic retention and the chemical-structural features of the drugs under analysis.