Clinical applications of fast liquid chromatography: A review on the analysis of cardiovascular drugs and their metabolites

One of the major challenges facing the medicine today is developing new therapies that enhance human health. To help address these challenges the utilization of analytical technologies and high-throughput automated platforms has been employed; in order to perform more experiments in a shorter time frame with increased data quality. In the last decade various analytical strategies have been established to enhance separation speed and efficiency in liquid chromatography applications. Liquid chromatography is an increasingly important tool for monitoring drugs and their metabolites. Furthermore, liquid chromatography has played an important role in pharmacokinetics and metabolism studies at these drug development stages since its introduction. This paper provides an overview of current trends in fast chromatography for the analysis of cardiovascular drugs and their metabolites in clinical applications. Current trends in fast liquid chromatographic separations involve monolith technologies, fused-core columns, high-temperature liquid chromatography (HTLC) and ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC). The high specificity in combination with high sensitivity makes it an attractive complementary method to traditional methodology used for routine applications. The practical aspects of, recent developments in and the present status of fast chromatography for the analysis of biological fluids for therapeutic drug and metabolite monitoring, pharmacokinetic studies and bioequivalence studies are presented. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.