Novel method of determination of D9-tetrahydrocannabinol(THC) in human serum by high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection.
In Europe and the United States, D9-tetrahydrocannabinol(THC, dronabinol), one of the psychoactive constituents of cannabis, has been used for both its anti-emetic and orexigenic effects in cancer patient receiving chemotherapy.However, dronabinol has not yet been launched in the market in Japan.In the future, it is necessary to ascertain the pharmacokinetics of dronabinol in cancer paitient.Therefore, we developed an HPLC procedure using electrochemical detection(ECD)for quan- titation of the concentrations of dronabinol in blood.An eluent of 50mM KH2PO4CH3CN(916)was used as the mobile phase.The column was used the XTerra®RP18, and the voltage of the electrochemical detector in dronabinol was set at 400 mV.As a result, the calibration curve was linear in the range of 10 ngmL to 100 ngmL(y964.85x -3,419, r0.997).The lower limit of quantification was 0.5 ngmL(SN3).The relative within-runs and between-runs standard deviations for the assay dronabinol were less than 4.7%. The method reported here is superior to previously reported methods in cancer patient.