Therapeutic drug monitoring of topiramate with a new HPLC method, SPE extraction and high sensitivity pre-column fluorescent derivatization.

BACKGROUND Topiramate is a 2nd generation antiepileptic drug (AED) recently approved by the FDA for migraine prophylaxis. Its pharmacological activity already appears significant at low doses. Unfortunately, the difficulty in determining the drug in serum at low concentrations hampers the completion of accurate pharmacokinetic studies in humans. Only chromatographic methods allow reaching the necessary sensitivities. METHODS Almost all of the HPLC methods proposed were based on the preliminary extraction of topiramate from the sample using organic solvents. In our study, the conditions for purifying topiramate through solid-liquid technique in disposable cartridges (SPE) packed with C18 reversed phase were examinated and optimised. After a pre-column derivatization step with 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC-Cl) and internal standard addition, topiramate was analysed on a CN column with sodium phosphate buffer 50 mmol/L (pH 2.5) containing acetonitrile (60:40, v/v) as the mobile phase. The column effluent was monitored with a fluorescence detector (excitation and emission 1 260 and 315 nm, respectively). 122 samples from our routine laboratory work were analysed in order to confirm the existence of a relationship between topiramate dose and serum concentration and to evaluate the effect of concomitant therapies with enzyme-inducing AEDs. RESULTS Sensitivity (2 ng/mL), precision (CV within assay of 3.8% and between assays of 6.6%), linearity and accuracy of the method were better than other analytical procedures previously reported. Serum topiramate levels in the group with enzyme-inducing AEDs showed a reduction with respect to the group with non-enzyme-inducing AEDs and the correlation between doses and mean serum concentration gives a linear trend (r2 = 0.916). CONCLUSIONS The efficacy of SPE extraction together with the method's reliability proved very advantageous for pharmacokinetics studies and, in principle, for therapeutic drug monitoring and toxicological investigations.