Antifungal Azole Metabolites: Significance in Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis
Individualised therapy and factors determining such variability among patients are confusing to both physicians and their patients because of the observed therapeutic, metabolic and toxic response. The same is true about antifungal azoles. They are under the influence and become targets of metabolic drug-drug interactions where more than one active form of the drug may be involved. The clinical relevance of these interactions may vary upon the azole involved and upon the intention of drug administration. The pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics of azole drugs as indicated by the reviewed data make the need for characterization of all their metabolites even more evident. The health care systems also emphasize the identification and quantitation of the metabolites for a comprehensive understanding of the biological safety of individual metabolites, thus, revealing the need and scope of bioanalytical research in metabolite and toxicity profiling of drugs. Availability of protocols for qualitative and quantitative characterization of all metabolites will have many applications for therapeutic drug monitoring, bioequivalence, toxicological and all related studies. Identification of metabolites may be done by a variety of chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques, either alone or in combination with other techniques. Conventional liquid chromatography has been exploited widely in the field of metabolite profiling. The arrival of hyphenated techniques has revolutionized metabolite profiling, by not only separating but also generating data for the structural identification of metabolites as well. Among all techniques, the most exploited are Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, Liquid Chromatography-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy, Liquid Chromatography-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy-Mass Spectroscopy and Extraction-Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. This compilation provides a tool for the metabolic, bioanalytical and biomedical understanding of antifungal azole metabolites.
High-Resolution Characterization of Liquid-Crystalline [60]Fullerenes Using Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
