Determination of imidazobenzodiazepine-3-car☐amide, a new anxiolytic agent, in human plasma by gas chromatography—negative chemical-ionization mass spectrometry

A method is described for measuring imidazobenzodiazepine-3-car☐yamide, a new anxiolytic agent, in human plasma. A tetradeuterated analogue of the analyte is used as the internal standard. The drug and its internal standard are (1) extracted from plasma at pH 9 with benzene containing 20% 1, 2-dichloroethane, (2) derivatized with pentafluoropropionic anhydride in the presence of triethylamine and (3) the nitrile derivative of the analyte and internal standard are analyzed by gas chromatography (GC)—negative chemical-ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS) using methane as both GC carrier gas and CI reagent gas. The mass spectrometer is set to monitor the intense (M-HCl)⁻- ions of imidazobenzodiazepine-3-nitrile and its tetradeuterated analogue atm/z 316 andm/z 320, respectively. Quantitation of an experimental plasma sample is based on the comparison of them/z 316 tom/z 320 ion ratio in each sample to that obtained from the analyses of control plasma spiked with various amounts of the drug and a fixed amount of internal standard. The limit of quantitation of the method is approximately 100 pg ml⁻¹ of plasma and the precision (relative standard deviation) at a plasma concentration of 1 ng ml⁻¹ is 4%.