Studying medicine safety in breastfeeding requires both clinical and non-clinical approaches. Our efforts include analysing how common medicines like antibiotics transfer to milk in in vivo models. A ConcePTION project publication in Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods reports on a sensitive and rapid method for estimating the concentration of amoxicillin – a commonly used antibiotic – in plasma and milk.
In addition to the clinical studies conducted using the ConcePTION European Breast Milk Collection, we use in vivo, in vitro and in silico models to understand and predict how medicines transfer from mother to infant. To accurately measure this transfer, reliable bioanalytical methods are needed. We have developed a high-throughput, robust and reliable liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method to determine concentrations of amoxicillin in a large number of minipig plasma and milk samples. The method, published recently in Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods, was developed and validated according to FDA and EMA guidelines.
Pieter Annaert, Professor and chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences at KU Leuven is one of the authors. According to him, the method can be used for quantitation (meaning the estimation of how much of the medicine is present) of amoxicillin in both plasma and milk. The method is high-throughput, meaning the run time and speed of sample processing is low, which makes the method efficient because it is simple and easy to use. With this method, quantitation of Amoxicillin using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry takes only 5 minutes. It also provides a one-method approach to extract the chemicals of interest (analytes) from both plasma and milk. In addition, the validated method allows us to accurately measure concentrations in a 1000-fold range (10 ng/mL – 10 μg/mL).
Want to know more? Read the paper:
Armoudjian, Y., Lin, A., Lammens, B., Van Daele, J., Annaert, P. (2023) Sensitive and rapid method for the quantitation of amoxicillin in minipig plasma and milk by LC-MS/MS: A contribution from the IMI ConcePTION project, Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods,107264, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vascn.2023.107264.