Ligand–Receptor Binding and Determination of Free Concentrations.pdfVIP

11 LigandReceptor Binding and Determination of Free Concentrations Florin Marcel Musteata Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Albany, NY, USA 11.1 Introduction Bioanalytical chemistry is playing an increasingly central role in the fields of aca- demic and industrial science. It overlaps with a diverse range of disciplines, includ- ing biotechnology, biopharmaceuticals and diagnostics.1 Bioanalytical chemistry can be defined as the development and application of chemical measurements and instrumentation to problems in biology, biochemistry and medical science. For the pharmaceutical industry, bioanalytical chemistry is often synonymous with mea- surements in biological samples, typically in support of investigations of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics.2 Biological materials and pharmaceutical products are very complex mixtures. They often contain proteins, salts, acids, bases and numerous organic compounds that may be similar to the analyte of interest. Furthermore, the analytes often exist at low concentration in these samples. Despite significant advances in the develop- ment of highly efficient analytical instruments for the end-point determination of analytes in biological samples and pharmaceutical products, a pre-treatment step is usually necessary to extract and isolate the analytes of interest from complex matri- ces. The goal of sample preparation is to eliminate interfering compounds from the matrix using a minimum number of steps, resulting in a reproducible methodology. Many of the current sample preparation challenges are addressed by solid-phase microextraction (SPME), which was specifically developed to provide rapid sample preparation both in the laboratory and on-site (where the investigated system