Direct standard-free quantitation of Tamiflu and other pharmaceutical tablets using clustering agents with electrospray ionization mass spectrometry.

ABSTRACT: Accurate and rapid quantitation is advantageous to identify counterfeit and substandard pharmaceutical drugs. A standard-free electrospray ionization mass spectrometry method is used to directly determine the dosage in the prescription and over-the-counter drugs Tamiflu, Sudafed, and Dramamine. A tablet of each drug was dissolved in aqueous solution, filtered, and introduced into solutions containing a known concentration of l-tryptophan, l-phenylalanine, or prednisone as a clustering agent. The active ingredient(s) incorporates statistically into large clusters of the clustering agent where effects of differential ionization/detection are substantially reduced. From the abundances of large clusters, the dosages of the active ingredients in each of the tablets were determined to typically

SUBMITTER: Flick TG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2821454 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature