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Antineoplastic drugs are a wide and heterogeneous group of substances that, as universally known, can cause highly severe toxic effects to whoever is exposed. From an occupational safety point of view, surface contaminations inside preparation and administration units are a growing issue and therefore require the development and implementation of sensible and fast monitoring methods. The unlikelihood of a unique all-embracing chromatography, able to correctly retain and separate each analyte led to the need to create an orthogonal normal phase analysis, which might be able to fill the gaps in the more common reversed-phase ones. An existing hydrophilic interaction method has thus been expanded to 6 other drugs and applied to real samples after an evaluation of its performances. The experimental data were then used to evaluate the possibility of estimating reliable relationships between the chromatographic retention and the chemical-structural features of the drugs under analysis.

Growing attention on carcinogenicity and mutagenicity of antineoplastic drugs (ADs) from the International Agencies has led to the present strict safe handling and administration regulations. Accordingly, one of the most common ways to assess occupational exposure to these substances is to identify and quantify possible surface contamination inside hospital preparation and administration units. Thus, it is essential to develop a fast and high-throughput monitoring method capable of identifying a significant number of ADs. The present study reports developing a UHPLC–MS/MS analysis to screen 26 ADs surface contamination through wipe test sampling. A Cortecs UPLC T3 50 × 2.1 mm (1.6 µm) column was selected to perform the analysis, using the evaluations of previous studies and the Product Quality Research Institute (PQRI) database. The design of experiments (DoE) methodological approach was used to optimize the chromatographic conditions concerning the best separation between all ADs. The limits of quantification for the analytes were between the pg/mL and ng/mL orders, and the turnaround time was limited to about 15 min. The obtained accuracy was mostly between 90% and 110% for all the analytes, while the precision was under 10% and a low matrix effect was observed for said analytes. Only vindesine and docetaxel presented lower performances.

Platinum-based antineoplastic drugs (PtADs) are among the most important and used families of chemotherapy drugs, which, even showing severe side effects and being hindered by drug resistance, are not likely to be replaced clinically any time soon. The growing interest in the occupational health community in antineoplastic drug (AD) surface contamination requires the development of increasingly fast and easy high-throughput monitoring methods, even considering the lack of harmonized legally binding regulation criteria. Thus, a wipe sampling method together with zwitterionic hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC-Z)–tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) analysis was developed for the simultaneous evaluation of oxaliplatin, cisplatin, and carboplatin surface contaminations. A design of experiments approach was used to optimize the chromatographic conditions. Limits of quantification ranging from 2 to 5 ng/mL were obtained from interday and intraday repetitions for oxaliplatin and carboplatin, and between 170 and 240 ng/mL for cisplatin. The wipe desorption procedure is equivalent to other AD sampling methods, enabling a fast sample preparation, with an LC-MS/MS analysis time of less than 7 min.