High-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry for simultaneous determination of raltegravir, dolutegravir and elvitegravir concentrations in human plasma and cerebrospinal fluid samples.

A simple sample treatment procedure and sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method were developed for the simultaneous quantification of the concentrations of human immunodeficiency virus-1 integrase strand transfer inhibitors - raltegravir, dolutegravir and elvitegravir - in human plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Plasma and CSF samples (20 μL each) were deproteinized with acetonitrile. Raltegravir-d3 was used as the internal standard. Chromatographic separation was achieved on an XBridge C18 column (50 × 2.1 mm i.d., particle size 3.5 μm) using acetonitrile-water (7:3, v/v) containing 0.1% formic acid as the mobile phase at a flow rate of 0.2 mL/min. The run time was 5 min. Calibration curves for all three drugs were linear in the range 5-1500 ng/mL for plasma and 1-200 ng/mL for CSF. The intra- and inter-day precision and accuracy of all three drugs in plasma were coefficient of variation (CV) <12.9% and 100.0 ± 12.2%, respectively, while those in CSF were CV <12.3% and 100.0 ± 7.9%, respectively. Successful validation under the same LC-MS/MS conditions for both plasma and CSF indicates this analytical method is useful for monitoring the levels of these integrase strand transfer inhibitors in the management of treatment of HIV-1 carriers.