A study of photodegradation of quetiapine by the use of LC-MS/MS method

Photodegradation of quetiapine under UVC irradiation in methanol solution was investigated and structural elucidation of its photodegradation products was performed with the use of the reversed phase UHPLC system coupled with accurate mass hybrid ESI-Q-TOF mass spectrometer. During one run all essential data for the determination of photodegradation kinetics and for the structural elucidation of the products was collected with the use of auto MS/MS mode. Five degradation products were found and their masses and formulas were obtained with high accuracy (0.26–5.02 ppm). For all the analyzed compounds, MS/MS fragmentation spectra were also obtained allowing structural elucidation of the unknown degradation products and indicating photodegradation pathways of quetiapine. The main photodegradation product was identified as 2-[2-[4-(5-oxidodibenzo[b,f][1,4]thiazepin-11-yl)-1-piperazinyl]ethoxy]-ethanol and the photodegradation reaction yields the first-order kinetics with the rate constant k = 0.1094 h−1.