Trace determination of lenalidomide in plasma by non-extractive HPLC procedures with fluorescence detection after pre-column derivatization with fluorescamine

BACKGROUND: Lenalidomide (LND) is a new potent drug used for treatment of multiple myeloma. For its pharmacokinetic studies and therapeutic monitoring, a proper analytical method was required. RESULTS: In this study, a non extractive and simple pre-column derivatization procedures have been proposed, for the for trace determination of lenalidomide (LND) in human plasma by HPLC with fluorescence detection. Plasma samples were treated with acetonitrile for protein precipitation then treated with copper acetate to form stable complexes with the biogenic amines and mask their interference with the derivatization reaction of LND. Treated plasma samples containing LND was derivatized with fluorescamine (FLC) in aqueous media at ambient temperature. Separation of the derivatized LND was performed on Hypersil BDS C18 column (250 × 4.6 mm, 5 μm particle size) using a mobile phase consisting of phosphate buffer (pH 4):methanol: tetrahydrofuran (70:10:20, v/v) at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The derivatized samples were monitored at an emission wavelength of 495 nm after excitation at a wavelength of 382 nm. Under the optimum chromatographic conditions, a linear relationship with good correlation coefficient (r = 0.9997, n = 9) was found between the peak area and LND concentrations in the range of 2–100 ng/mL. The limits of detection and quantitation were 0.8 and 2.30 ng/mL, respectively. The intra- and inter-assay precisions were satisfactory and the accuracy of the method was proved. The recovery of LND from the spiked human plasma was 99.30 ± 2.88. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed method had high throughput as the analysis involved simple sample pre-treatment procedure and a relatively short run-time (< 15 min). The results demonstrated that the method would have a great value when it is applied in the therapeutic monitoring and pharmacokinetic studies for LND.