Recent progress of ICP-MS in the development of metal-based drugs and diagnostic agents

Abstract

Drug discovery and development is a long, expensive, and multiplex process, most of the steps (if not all of them) are unfeasible without use of different analytical techniques. In the case of metal-based drugs, their preclinical development and clinical testing increasingly rely on ICP-MS, having no-match analytical features in this seemingly ‘killer’ application. Applied with the standalone or combined (hyphenated) setup, the method allows robust, sensitive, and precise determinations of drug-comprising metals as well as specific and often multielemental detection of the biomolecular metabolic forms. This analytical information is invaluable for the assessment of drug-like properties, metabolite fingerprinting and profiling, monitoring the drug–biomolecule interactions, cellular uptake and pharmacokinetic studies, etc. but above all, for a better understanding of a drug's mechanisms of delivery and action. This review is mainly focused on the emerging role and current challenges of ICP-MS-based methodology in the field. Consistently with the title matter, special emphasis is placed on investigational metal-containing compounds that not only exhibit certain pharmacological or diagnostic properties but also hold promise of being advanced to (or already entered) clinical studies. It also provides a brief outlook of how the potential of ICP-MS is to be exploited in the future so as to accelerate the metallodrug development and reduce the enormous accompanying costs.