Rapid liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry-based screening procedures for studies on the biotransformation of drug candidates.

The accelerated pace of contemporary drug discovery and development in the pharmaceutical industry has generated increasing demands for early information on the metabolic fate of candidate drugs to guide the selection of new compounds for clinical evaluation. In response to these demands, we have developed a procedure for the rapid analysis of complex biological mixtures for the presence of drug-related materials and have embarked on the development of novel computer-based approaches whereby such procedures can be automated. The goal of this work was to rapidly identify drug metabolites (derived either from a single substrate or from a mixture of substrates) formed in vivo or in vitro. The approach that we have developed relies on the use of generic chromatographic and mass spectrometric methods for analysis of mixtures of drugs and metabolites and on correlation analysis of tandem mass spectrometry spectra to distinguish drug-related components from endogenous materials. Cross-correlation of the spectra also is used to identify the relationship between each metabolite and its respective parent drug in the mixture. In this manner, metabolites of a mixture of several drugs may be analyzed in the time it normally would take to analyze the products from a single substrate. We show that this rapid analytical approach can, with only minor sacrifices in the completeness of the data, significantly increase the number of compounds whose metabolic fate can be elucidated in a given time.