• Journal of Life Science
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• v.19 no.12
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• pp.1698-1704
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• 2009

Gemcitabine is an anticancer drug used to treat a variety of solid tumors. The drug is rapidly inactivated by cytidine deaminase in plasma and its hydrophilicity restricts the extent of quantification that is possible using reversed-phase liquid chromatography. In this paper, we report a rapid and precise method to analyze velocity and peak efficiency using ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) with a reversed-phase column. The retention periods of gemcitabine and 2'-deoxycytidine at 283 nm were 3.2 and 2.1 min, respectively. The assay provided highly linear results in the range of $0.1{\sim}20{\mu}g/ml$ ($r^2$ > 0.999). The coefficients of variation of the intra-day and inter-day assays were less than 10.0%. We observed that the estimated average concentrations of the intra-day and inter-day assays ranged from 97.3 to 113.5% to verify the accuracy. These results suggest that this new reversed-phase UPLC method is a rapid and reliable way of determining gemcitabine levels.