Fabric phase sorptive extraction for the determination of anthracyclines in sewage

Abstract

Usually, effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) end up to marine environment with emergent contaminants that are not completely removed. A family of these emergent contaminants are anthracyclines. They are a group of antineoplastic compounds used to treat acute leukemia and other cancers; they are excreted after consumption by patients and found in sewage waters at trace levels. For this reason, the development of sensitive analytical methodologies capable of determining them at low concentrations is of prime importance. In this work, a simple, fast and sensitive analytical method using fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE) followed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (UHPLC-FD) has been developed and validated for the extraction of daunorubicin (DAU), doxorubicin (DOX) and epirubicin (EPI) from sewage samples. FPSE is a green, cheap, simple, selective and rapid sample preparation technique. The different parameters that affect the performance of the FPSE process, including extraction time, eluting solvent, elution time and pH, were optimized through an experimental design. The developed method showed satisfactory reproducibility, with intraday and interday deviation values lower than 15% for all the compounds and limits of detection between 0.1–0.15 μg·L−1. The unique combination of sample preparation by this micro-extraction technique with fluorescence detector have resulted in the satisfactory extraction of highly polar anthracyclines, without any noticeable matrix effect, a very common shortcoming of exhaustive sample preparation technique such as solid phase extraction and mass spectrometry.