High sensitivity screening of antineoplastic drugs using a 1 mm diameter YMC-Triart C18 UHPLC column

Antineoplastic drugs are commonly used for the treatment of cancer. On the one hand they are life-saving for the ever-increasing number of affected people, on the other hand they can be harmful to people who are exposed to them including pharmacists, nurses and other staff members. Due to their adverse health effects, a detection process which is reliable and highly sensitive is very important. Even very low residual concentrations that occur e.g. on surfaces in hospitals or pharmacies need to be reliably monitored.

Screening of 6 different antineoplastic drugs by UHPLC/MS

In this application note, the screening of 6 antineoplastic drugs is shown. A YMC-Triart C18 UHPLC column was used with an internal diameter of 1 mm, which was introduced just recently. Due to the need of high sensitivity results where even the smallest amounts of these drugs need to be detected, a small internal column diameter is the ideal choice. By coupling it to mass spectrometry (MS) it becomes the perfect fit in order to detect low sensitivity compounds or low sample amounts with high sensitivity. Furthermore, also resources and costs can be reduced by miniaturising the analysis. Due to this smaller diameter compared to standard columns less mobile phase is used and also cycle times can be accelerated.

Now available: 1 mm high sensitivity UHPLC/MS columns

YMC-Triart C18 UHPLC columns with 1 mm ID for LC/MS use were introduced to fill the gap between YMC’s MicroLC- and UHPLC columns with 0.5 mm and 2.0 mm ID respectively. These columns are dedicated for labs that routinely use LC/MS and need to deal with very small concentrations where high sensitivities are important, e.g. in pharmaceutical R&D, in academia, and also in the environmental, clinical and food sectors.

Ideal combination of stationary phase and hardware

Due to its organic/inorganic hybrid silica base material, YMC-Triart stationary phases with 1.9 µm particle size are very robust and flexible: pH range of 1-12 as well as temperatures up to 90°C can be used. 1 mm YMC-Triart UHPLC columns are ideal for highly sensitive LC/MS analyses. They provide higher performances than competitor columns, due to the high precision YMC hardware in combination with a special column packing procedure. The reproducible hardware, which is particularly challenging for such small inner diameter, is accompanied by the excellent lot-to-lot reproducibility provided by the YMC-Triart stationary phases ensuring truly reproducible results.