A Fabric Phase Sorptive Extraction-High Performance Liquid Chromatography-Photo Diode Array Detection Method for the Determination of Twelve Azole Antimicrobial Drug Residues in Human Plasma and Urine

This paper reports a novel fabric phase sorptive extraction-high performance liquid chromatographyphotodiode array detection (FPSE-HPLC-PDA) method for the simultaneous extraction and analysis of twelve azole antimicrobial drug residues that include ketoconazole, terconazole, voriconazole, bifonazole, clotrimazole, tioconazole, econazole, butoconazole, miconazole, posaconazole, ravuconazole, and itraconazole in human plasma and urine samples. The selected azole antimicrobial drugs were well resolved by using a Luna C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm; 5 m particle size) in gradient elution mode within 36 min. The analytical method was calibrated and validated in the range from 0.1 to 8 g/mL for all the drug compounds. Blank human plasma and urine were used as the sample matrix for the analysis; while benzyl-4-hydroxybenzoate was used as the internal standard (IS). The limit of quantification of the FPSE-HPLC-PDA method was found as 0.1 g/mL and the weighted-matrix matched standard calibration curves of the drugs showed a good linearity upto a concentration of 8 g/mL. The parallelism tests were also performed to evaluate whether overrange sample can be analyzed after dilution, without compromising the analytical performances of the validated method. The intra- and inter-day precision (RSD%) values were found ≤13.1% and ≤13.9%, respectively. The intra- and inter-day trueness (bias%) values were found in the range from −12.1% to 10.5%. The performances of the validated FPSE-HPLC-PDA were further tested on real samples collected from healthy volunteers after a single dose administration of itraconazole and miconazole. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FPSE extraction procedure applied on plasma and urine samples for the simultaneous determination of twelve azole drugs possessing a wide range of logKow values (extending from 0.4 for fluconazole to 6.70 of butoconazole) and could be adopted as a rapid and robust green analytical tool for clinical and pharmaceutical applications.