Voltammetric and electrogeneration approaches for the assessment of the oxidative drug metabolism.

In this paper, electrochemical (EC) methods have been proposed to evaluate the oxidative behavior of drugs as rapid, simple, and cheap strategies to predict some metabolic features. Various commercial drugs belonging to different therapeutic families have been assayed to deal with a wide variety of biotransformations and to cover different metabolism extents. First, differential pulse voltammetry has been applied to evaluate the oxidative behavior of drugs. Voltammetric assays have demonstrated to be highly efficient to predict the metabolism extent from the current intensity data. The second objective of this work has been the comparison of metabolite profiles from both EC and in vitro methods based on liver microsome assays. The resulting samples have been analyzed by reversed-phase liquid chromatography mode using a core-shell column and UV detection. Chromatographic methods have been established for each particular drug and its metabolites using 0.1% (v/v) formic acid aqueous solution and methanol (MeOH) as the components of the mobile phase. Drug oxidation products from both EC- and microsome-based methodologies have been compared in terms of variety and percentage from the corresponding chromatographic profiles. In general, most of the metabolites occurring in vitro have also been reproduced in the EC runs. Besides, it has been found that compositional profiles from EC experiments are dependent on experimental variables such as pH and potential. In general, acid (pH 2) and basic (pH 10) conditions and too high potentials can contribute to the generation of oxidation artifacts which differ from metabolites while milder potentials and neutral pH values may reproduce more accurately the microsome patterns. The proposed methodology is suitable for a first study of the oxidative behavior of molecules that can be related to relevant metabolic properties. The obtained information could be of great interest to prioritize or discard compounds, as a first screening, on the research of drug candidates.