Automatic Supported Liquid Extraction (SLE) Coupled with HILIC-MS/MS: An Application to Method Development and Validation of Erlotinib in Human Plasma

A novel bioanalytical method was developed and validated for the quantitative determination of erlotinib in human plasma by using the supported liquid extraction (SLE) sample cleanup coupled with hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometric detection (HILIC-MS/MS). The SLE extract could be directly injected into the HILIC-MS/MS system for analysis without the solvent evaporation and reconstitution steps. Therefore, the method is simple and rapid. In the present method, erlotinib-d(6) was used as the internal standard. The SLE extraction recovery was 101.3%. The validated linear curve range was 2 to 2,000 ng/mL based on a sample volume of 0.100-mL, with a linear correlation coefficient of > 0.999. The validation results demonstrated that the present method gave a satisfactory precision and accuracy: intra-day CV < 5.9% (<8.4% for the lower limit of quantitation, LLOQ) with n = 6 and the accuracy of 98.0–106.0%; inter-day CV < 3.2% (<1.5% for LLOQ) with n = 18 and the accuracy of 100.0–103.2%. A dilution factor of 10 with blank plasma was validated for partial volume analysis. The stability tests indicated that the erlotinib in human plasma is stable for three freeze-thaw cycles (100.0–104.5% of the nominal values), or 24-h ambient storage (100.0–104.8% of the nominal values), or 227-day frozen storage at both -20 °C (91.5–94.5% of the nominal values) and -70 °C (93.3–93.8% of the nominal values). The results also showed no significant matrix effect (<6.3%) even with direct injection of organic extract into the LC-MS/MS system. The validated method has been successfully applied to support a clinical study.