Utility of noninvasive biomatrices in pharmacokinetic studies

Abstract

Blood and plasma are the biomatrices traditionally used for drug monitoring and their pharmacokinetic profiling. Blood is the circulating fluid in contact with all organs and tissues of body and thus is the most representative fluid for measuring systemic drug levels. However, venipuncture suffers from the caveat of being an invasive technique which often makes people reluctant to participate in clinical studies. Thus, there is a need for noninvasive bio-fluids that are ethically appropriate, cost-efficient and toxicologically relevant. These alternate bio-fluids may prove clinically useful as alternatives to plasma/serum in therapeutic drug monitoring, pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies, doping control in sports medicine and to monitor local adverse effects. These may be of particular interest in the case of special population groups such as neonates, children, the elderly, terminally ill patients and pregnant or lactating women, and offer the advantage of circumvention of the demand for specialized personnel for sample collection. This review describes such noninvasive bio-fluids (saliva, sweat, tears and milk) that have been considered for pharmacokinetic drug analysis, emphasizing their sample preparation, its associated difficulties and their correlation with plasma.

Bioanalytical challenge: A review of environmental and pharmaceuticals contaminants in human milk

“…Nursing mothers can be exposed to medications or other therapeutics, either short or long-term, depending on the need of the treatment [1].…”

“…Its application to human milk samples is, however, limited, as it does not fully remove the lipids and the oligosaccharides (HMO) present in this matrix [1,5,22,23].…”

“…In spite of this, this sample matrix is considered to be unconventional [4] due to their great composition variability. Human milk contains, in variable high amounts, protein, fat and carbohydrates and it is more acidic than plasma (pH varying from 6.6-7.2) [1,2]. It changes in accordance to the infant´s age, sex and other characteristics and seems tailored made to reflect each infant necessity [5,6].…”

“…Human milk is an abundant sample matrix for evaluating how much the excretion of xenobiotics is transferred to the infant; furthermore it is an excellent noninvasive means of monitoring the excretion of chemical compounds and their metabolites [1][2][3]. In spite of this, this sample matrix is considered to be unconventional [4] due to their great composition variability.…”

Noninvasive profiling of sweat‐derived lipid mediators for cutaneous research

“…Apocrine and apoeccrine sweat glands located in the axillary and genital regions of the body have a distinct secretory mechanism from eccrine sweat glands, and apocrine and apoeccrine sweat are less well characterized compared to eccrine sweat. Therefore, (eccrine) sweat might offer access to a potentially valuable and noninvasive biological sample that could help improve subject compliance in pharmacokinetic and biomedical studies, as has been demonstrated with other non-invasive matrices such as hair, saliva and tears (11). …”