Selectivity screening and subsequent data evaluation strategies in liquid chromatography: the example of 12 antineoplastic drugs.

Abstract

Optimization of the chromatographic selectivity is the most important parameter if a separation is needed for the hyphenation of liquid chromatography with mass spectrometry. In mass spectrometry, this is necessary if the investigated analytes have identical mass transitions, like isomers or epimers. For the separation of the 12 most important antineoplastic drugs, a selectivity screening was performed using 20 columns and two organic modifiers and temperatures to find a suitable phase system in order to separate critical peak pairs. Therefore, an evaluation strategy was applied in form of a principal component analysis (PCA), selectivity factor, and overall selectivity comparison to find a suitable phase system. Some boundary conditions were defined to consider the specific requirements of tandem mass spectrometry. The results clearly indicated that the selectivity factor of the critical peak pairs increased using methanol at higher temperature.