5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) has a broad spectrum of anti-tumor activity, widely applied to the treatment of cancers. However, it is necessary to determine the plasma concentration of 5-FU in clinical practice due to its narrow therapeutic index. Therefore, a simple, economic and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed and validated for the determination of 5-FU in human plasma. Ethyl acetate was chosen as extraction reagent. Chromatographic separation was performed on a Diamonsil C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d., 5 μm) with the mobile phase consisting of methanol and 20 mmol/L ammonium formate using a linear gradient elution at a flow rate of 0.8 mL/min. 5-FU and 5-bromouracil (5-BU) were detected by UV detector at 265 nm. The calibration curve was linear over the concentration range of 5—500 ng/mL and the correlation coefficient was not less than 0.992 6 for all calibration curves. The intra- and inter-day precisions were less than 10.5% and 4.3%, respectively, and the accuracy was within ±3.7%. The recovery at all concentration levels was 80.1±8.6%. 5-FU was stable under possible conditions of storing and handling. This method is proved applicable to therapeutic drug monitoring and pharmacokinetic studies of 5-FU in human.
The present article covers a simple approach to detect and subsequently identify in vivo metabolites of brodimoprim, using high performance liquid chromatography coupled to ion trap mass spectrometer（LC/ESI-MS）, which is based on a data-dependent acquisition of isotope ions and result verified by full scan mass spectrum. The distinguished advantage of data-dependent scan is rapidness because it requires minimum sample preparation, and all the necessary data can be obtained in one chromatographic run. In addition, it is highly sensitive and selective, allowing detection of trace metabolites even in the presence of complex biomatrix. As a result, four phase-Ⅰ（M1--M4） and four Phase-Ⅱ（M5--M8） metabolites of brodimoprim were identified in urine after the oral administration of hrodimoprim to Wistar rats. Their chemical structures were proposed based on the interpretation of their CID fragmentation characterizations and the metabolic pathway was exhibited in this article.
