Presence of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals used worldwide in the environment is directly linked to the human impact. Potentially relevant group of environmental pollutants are antiviral drugs which have been put under a spotlight after a worldwide outbreak of swine influenza virus in 2009. But, antiviral drugs used for treatment of other viral infections like HIV, hepatitis or herpes could be equally significant. According to UNAIDS, 2.1 million new HIV infections have been reported in 2015. Although this number has been in moderate but constant decline in the last decades, still over 36 million people worldwide are living with HIV. Like other pharmaceuticals, antivirals are only partially metabolised in the human body and, once excreted, they can reach the aquatic environment via WWTPs. As a result, they can end up in surface water together with the mixture of their human metabolites and transformation products which are formed along the way. In order to evaluate their presence in the aquatic system, the aim of this work was to develop a target analytical method based on LC-MS. However, in order to avoid classical target method development which commonly relies on arbitrary selection of target compounds, here we used a suspect screening approach where a 100+ antivirals suspect list was matched to WWTP samples as a guarantee of environmental presence. This was especially advantageous since no data on drug consumption could be obtained. In our case, WWTP influent and effluent of the largest catalan WWTPs was sampled over three consecutive days. The samples were extracted using a generic SPE method and analysed using LC-QExactive-MS. Each positively detected exact mass was further rationalised with fragmentation logic for a specific compound/structure. A list of antivirals identified and detected in all three consecutive days were considered important and were advanced to the target method development step. The list was joined with compounds that have been reported to occur in high concentrations in other publications in order to check whether non-detection was due to lack of presence of lack of selectivity. Additionally, recently marketed compounds were also added to the method since its consumption rates were expected to grow over time. Finally, in order to decrease the analysis time, target method was developed using on-line SPE coupled to LC-MS for fast and reliable quantification of forty antiviral compounds in the aquatic environmental samples.<br/>

Smart target method development for detection of antiviral compounds in aqueous environmental samples based on suspect screening and HRMS

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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