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

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 concentrations of 139 ± 136 ng/ml for quetiapine, 328 ± 195 ng/ml for clozapine, 48 ± 27 ng/ml for olanzapine and 71 ± 52 ng/ml for perazine. The method was thus suitable for routine therapeutic drug monitoring and may be extended to other drugs.