Automated analysis of quetiapine and other antipsychotic drugs in human blood by high performance-liquid chromatography with column-switching and spectrophotometric detection.

Abstract An automated HPLC method with column switching is described for the determination of quetiapine, clozapine, perazine, olanzapine and metabolites in blood serum. After clean-up on silica C8 material (20 μm particle size) drugs were separated on ODS Hypersil C18 material (5 μm; column size 250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d.) within 25 min and quantified by ultraviolet (UV) detection at 254 nm. The limit of quantification ranged between 10 and 50 ng/ml. At therapeutic concentrations of the drugs, the inter-assay reproducibility was below 10%. Analyses of drug concentrations in serum of 75–295 patients treated with therapeutic doses of the antipsychotic drugs revealed mean ± S.D. steady state concen…