Quantitation of sunitinib, an oral multitarget tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and its metabolite in urine samples by nonaqueous capillary electrophoresis time of flight mass spectrometry.

A rapid, sensitive, and specific method was developed and validated using a nonaqueous-capillary electrophoresis method with TOF-MS for determination of sunitinib and N-desethyl sunitinib in human urine. In order to avoid ionic suppression a urine samples dilution with methanol 1:10 previous step was used. This was the only treatment step to urine samples before the injection. Despite this dilution of the urine, the detection limit was as low as 0.07 mg/L for sunitinib and 0.15 mg/L for N-desethyl sunitinib. Separation of compounds was achieved with a mixture of 5 mM ammonium formate in methanol. The calibration curves were linear over the range of 0.5-50.0 mg/L for the two analyzed compounds. The within-run and between-run precisions were within 5%, while the accuracy ranged from 96.0 to 100.4%. This method can be used in routine clinical practice to monitor sunitinib and N-desethyl sunitinib drugs in the urine of cancer patients treated with once daily administration.