| dc.description.abstract | Solid phase microextraction (SPME) has gained much popularity for in vivo applications recently. Thus far, there are two types of pre-equilibrium kinetic calibration that have been applied to in vivo SPME: on-fibre standardization and dominant pre-equilibrium desorption. Both of these techniques have their own advantages and disadvantages. To address the limitations presented by these two techniques, a third pre-equilibrium kinetic calibration method, the diffusion-based interface model, was investigated. The diffusion-based interface model had been successfully applied to air and water samples but was never utilized for in vivo SPME studies. For the first part of the research, on-fibre standardization, dominant pre-equilibrium desorption, and diffusion-based interface model were compared in terms of accuracy, precision, and experimental procedures, by using a flow-through system. These three kinetic calibrations were further validated by equilibrium SPME extraction and protein-plasma precipitation, a current state-of-the-art sampling method.
The potential of diffusion-based interface model was yet again demonstrated in the second part of the research project. This calibration method was applied to comparative pharmacokinetic studies of two drugs, fenoterol and methoxyfenoterol, on 5 rats. To provide a constant sampling rate as required for diffusion-based interface model, a SPME animal sampling autosampler, AccuSampler®, was utilized. It custom-written program allowed the entire SPME sampling procedure excluding insertion and removal of SPME probes to be automated. Furthermore, to validate the results obtained by SPME, the AccuSampler® was programmed to withdraw blood after each SPME sampling time point for conventional method analysis using protein-plasma precipitation. The well correlated data obtained by SPME sampling and the conventional method illustrated the potential of diffusion-based interface model as an excellent choice for future in vivo SPME applications. | en |
