ABBOTT PARK, Ill.—Researchers often use liver microsomes to screen the ADME properties of new drug candidates, relying on HPLC-MS to characterize metabolic stability. Scientists at Abbott Laboratories recently realized, however, that HPLC's baseline resolution wasn't necessary for this process and so explored SPE-MS as a high-throughput alternative.

 

As they reported in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, directly compared the characterization of a variety of druglike compounds using HPLC-MS and SPE-MS (C18 SPE cards). They found that all of the compounds detected by HPLC were detectable by SPE, although SPE did seem to be 2.5-fold less sensitive. They then screened 137 structurally diverse compounds in human microsomes and noted that SPE-MS provided results comparable to those achieved with HPLC-MS.

 

The researchers suggested that concerns over coelution of products of similar mass or the poor retention of polar compounds were not significant problems in their experiences. Instead, they said that the 5-fold throughput improvement of SPE-MS over HPLC-MS suggested its generally applicability in a variety of ADME studies.