Implementation of a generic SFC-MS method for the quality control of potentially counterfeited medicinal cannabis with synthetic cannabinoids

Rapid Simultaneous Determination of 11 Synthetic Cannabinoids in Urine by Liquid Chromatography-Triple Quadrupole Mass Spectrometry

Synthetic cannabinoids are a series of synthetic substances that mimic the effects of natural cannabinoids and produce a much stronger toxicity than natural cannabinoids, and they have become the most abused family of new psychoactive substances. A solid-phase extraction–liquid chromatography–triple quadrupole/linear ion trap mass spectrometry method has been developed to determine 11 synthetic cannabinoids in rat urine. Oasis HLB cartridge was selected to simultaneously extract synthetic cannabinoids for pretreatment. The effects of the loading solution and elution reagent volume on the recovery were investigated. The optimized acetonitrile proportion and elution reagent volume were determined by both high recovery and low solvent consumption. The results showed that the linear coefficients of determination of 11 types of synthetic cannabinoids ranged from 0.993 to 0.999, the limit of quantitation ranged from 0.01 to 0.1 ng/mL, and the spiked recoveries ranged from 69.90% to 118.39%. The research presented here provides a validated liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method to accurately identify and quantitate synthetic cannabinoid metabolites in urine samples.

Potency testing of cannabinoids by liquid and supercritical fluid chromatography: Where we are, what we need

Hemp and cannabis industry is undergoing a renewed interest due to legalization of marijuana (a topic that all countries are discussing, especially in recent years) and the growing importance of therapeutic properties of cannabinoids. Together with an increment in the production of hemp and recreational cannabis, there has been an increasing demand for accurate potency testing of products (i.e. quantification of main cannabinoids present in the plant in terms of weight percentage) prior commercialization. This translates in an urgent need of reliable analytical methods to characterize cannabis and hemp samples. Cannabis and hemp preparations are commercialized under various forms (e.g., flowers, oils, candies or even baked goods) usually containing a large number of often very similar compounds making their separation very challenging. Strictly connected to this, another emerging topic concerns the need for the developing of large scale separation techniques for the purification of cannabinoids from complex matrices and for the preparation of analytical-grade standards (including the chiral ones). This paper reviews the most recent achievements in both these aspects. Cutting-edge applications and novel opportunities in potency testing by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with UV detection (which is becoming the golden standard, according to several pharmacopeias, for this kind of measurements) are discussed. The focus has been given to the very important topic of enantio-discrimination of chiral cannabinoids, for which supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) appears to be particularly suitable. The last part of the work covers the purification of cannabinoids through preparative chromatography. In this regard, particular attention has been given to the most innovative multi-column techniques allowing for the continuous purification of target molecules. The most recent advancements and future challenges in this field are discussed.

Ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography in impurity control II: Method validation

In our previous study we proposed a screening approach using ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography for the determination of 10 pharmaceutical quality control mixtures. Most of resulting methods offered baseline separation of all analytes. However, some of these methods had to be further optimized to ensure their successful validation and applicability to impurity control in drug substance and drug products. Several challenges occurred during the optimization including: (i) the necessity of the resolution of active pharmaceutical ingredient and following impurity equaling at least 3, which was especially difficult to achieve for mixtures of structurally close compounds, (ii) unrepeatable elution of compounds eluting close to the dead volume or at the end of the gradient elution, and (iii) shifts in retention times due to the column aging and effects of additive. The most frequent optimization adjustments involved changes in gradient program. Other adjustments such as the substitution of Viridis UPC² HSS C18 SB column with a slightly different Acquity UPLC HSS C18 SB column, the addition of acetonitrile in the modifier, and the column coupling also led to beneficial changes in selectivity. Subsequently, validation of all 10 methods was carried out to prove the applicability of ultra-high performance supercritical fluid chromatography methods for the impurity control in pharmaceuticals. Parameters recommended by ICH guidelines Q2 and Q3 including specificity, linearity, range, lower and upper limit of quantification, limit of detection, accuracy, and precision were examined. In addition, intermediate precision and the accuracy profiles were determined for selected methods. Overall, only two impurities did not meet the validation criteria due to low resolution and low sensitivity, respectively. Only identification threshold and not reporting threshold was met for this impurity.