Ion mobility spectrometry for pharmacokinetic studies--exemplary application.

Breath analysis is an attractive non-invasive method for diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring. It uses endogenously produced compounds and metabolites of isotopically labeled precursors. In order to make such tests clinically useful, it is important to have relatively small portable instruments detecting volatile compounds within short time. A particularly promising analytical technique is ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) coupled to a multi capillary column (MCC). This paper focuses on demonstrating the suitability of breath analysis for pharmacokinetic applications using MCC-IMS with respect to practicability and reproducibility testing the model substrate eucalyptol. Validation of the MCC-IMS measurements were performed using proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and resulted in an excellent correspondence of the time-dependent concentrations presented by the two different analytical techniques. Moreover, the good accordance in variance of kinetic parameters with repeated measures, and the determined inter-subject differences indicate the eligibility of the analysis method.