Optimisation of an extraction and preconcentration procedure based on fabric phase sorptive extraction for the determination of antineoplastic fluorescent drugs in hospital effluents

Abstract

Antineoplastic compounds are medicines used against cancer. They act by killing cells or inhibiting their growth. However, they not act selectively, which mean that they are going to kill all cells, not only the cancerous ones. Because of that, they are potentially harmful [1]. Once patients are treated by this medicine, they excrete more than 50% of the medicine without metabolize, reaching wastewater treatment plants. They are not completely degraded, so, they come up in the effluent of the wastewater treatment plants. As with many others pharmaceutical compounds in the wastewater treatment plants, antineoplastic compounds are found in very low concentrations. For that reason, it is necessary the use of techniques and procedures able to concentrate this kind of analytes before their determination. The bulk of the papers conduct this step by solid phase extraction, nevertheless this technique requires, in many cases, high volume of samples and long extraction times [2]. In this communication, we present the optimisation of a methodology for the extraction and determination of antineoplastic compounds (anthracyclines) by using ultra high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (UHPLC-FD) after their extraction by a microextraction technique that uses sol-gel sorbents (Fabric Phase Sorptive Extraction, FPSE) [3]. The extraction conditions have been optimised by an experimental design in which all variables that affect the process were studied. In addition, we have tested different sol-gel sorbents to find the most suitable. After that, determination analytical parameters were established.