APCI pharmaceuticals

The most commonly used LC/MS interfaces in pharmaceutical analysis are ESI and APCI. An ESI interface on the majority of commercial mass spectrometers utilizes both heat and nebulization to achieve conditions in favor of solvent evaporation over analyte decomposition. While ionization in APCI occurs in the gas phase, ionization using ESI occurs in solution. Attributes of a mobile phase such as surface tension, conductivity, viscosity, dielectric constant, flow rate and pFi, all determine the ionization efficiency. They therefore need to be taken into consideration and controlled. 

ESI and APCI [12, 13] are the dominant techniques today for LC-MS in pharmaceutical analysis. These both occur at atmospheric pressure hence the phrase atmospheric pressure ionisation (API). 

APCI is widely used nowadays in different application fields for low molecular weight analytes. Many of them can either be analyzed with ESI or APCI, and the choice of the method should take into account several aspects, such as the physical-chemical properties of the molecule, the mobile phase composition and the required flow rate, and possible matrix effects. Typical APCI applications are in pharmaceutical, environmental, and food safety analysis. 

Qin X-Z, Ip DP, Chang KH-C, Dradransky PM, Brooks MA, Sakuma T. Pharmaceutical application of LC-MS. 1—Characterization of a famotidine degradate in a package screening study by LC-APCI MS. J Pharm Biomed Anal 1994 12(2) 221-233. 

Mass spectrometry (MS) is playing an increasingly visible role in the molecular characterization of combinatorial libraries, natural products, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, toxicology and forensic investigations, and proteomics. Toward this end, electrospray ionization (ESI), atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI), and atmospheric pressure photo-ionization (APPI) have proven valuable for both qualitative and quantitative screening of small molecules (e.g., pharmaceutical products) [9-14]. 

A variety of MS formats are widely accepted and applied in the pharmaceutical industry. The specific MS application is often defined by the sample introduction technique. The pharmaceutical applications highlighted in this article feature two types of sample introduction techniques dynamic and static. Dynamic sample introduction involves the use of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) on-line with MS. The resulting liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) format provides unique and enabling capabilities for pharmaceutical analysis. The electrospray ionization (ESI) and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) modes are the most widely used. Static sample introduction techniques primarily use matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI). ... 

Figures 3 and 4 demonstrate the dramatic growth of API, APCI, and elec-trospray, both within and external to pharmaceutical science, by graphing the...

Figure 4 Bar chart representing the annual number of articles involving electrospray and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) mass spectrometry in relationship to pharmaceutical science.

Mass spectrometry (MS) has become one of the most important analytical tools employed in the analysis of pharmaceuticals. This can most likely be attributed to the availability of new instrumentation and ionization techniques that can be used to help solve difficult bioanalytical problems associated with this field (1-8). Perhaps the best illustration of this occurrence is the development of electrospray (ESI) and related atmospheric-pressure ionization (API) techniques, ion-spray (nebulizer-assisted API), turbo ionspray (thermally assisted API), and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI nebulization coupled with corona discharge), for use in drug disposition studies. The terms ESI and ionspray tend to be used interchangeably in the literature. For the purpose of this review, the term API will be used to describe both ESI and ionspray. In recent years there has been an unprecedented explosion in the use of instrumentation dedicated to API/MS (4,6,8-14). API-based ionization techniques have now become the method of choice for the analysis of pharmaceuticals and their metabolites. This has made thermospray (TSP), the predominant LC/MS technique during the 1980s, obsolete (15). Numerous reports describing the utility of API/MS for pharmaceutical analysis have appeared in the literature over the last decade (7). The... 

Right from the outset of the 1990s, a selection of those interfaces that could be adapted to a routine LC-MS analysis was observable. This trend had been initiated by pharmacological and pharmaceutical research, although it had the TSP interface at its disposal, which was a well-adapted and reliable type of interface that had shown its fiiU capacity in manifold appliances. The sample material, being available only in very limited quantities for such research, and improved separation techniques, as, for example, capillary electrophoresis (CE) or capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) necessitated different types of interfaces that could be operated with considerably smaller amounts of sample than the TSP interface, which reached its optimized sensitivity with flow rates of about 2 mL min. Such a desirably lower sample demand is guaranteed by atmospheric pressure ionisation (API) interfaces, atmospheric pressure chemical ionisation (APCI) and electrospray ionisation (ESI) interface. 

The use of APCI for the analysis of drugs or their metabolites in environmental samples is not yet as common as for ESI applications (cf 15.3.3.2 ESI, dmgs). Predominantly aqueous samples, e.g., effluents of STPs or wastewaters from pharmaceutical industry were studied. Surface and groundwater samples were also under... 

FIGURE 4.22 CODA chromatogram from LCMS analysis of pharmaceutical using positive APCI. 

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