Liquid chromatography–full scan mass spectrometry data mining for quantitation of cyclosporine-A and tacrolimus in water samples

The recent years, the presence of pharmaceuticals and their transformation products in the environmental samples has become a global concern because of their potential for toxicity on humans, animals, and plants. The evaluation and detection of different pharmaceutical classes in water samples is an urgent need and a great challenge to achieve their risk assessment, and elimination from aqueous media. The immunosuppressant drugs may enter the environment through wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and induce potentially harmful, irrecoverable and toxic effects on aquatic organisms and they may also affect the human health and the human reproductive system. In the present study, a smart strategy that is a combination of liquid chromatography–full scan mass spectrometry (LC–MS) measurements with second-order calibration method based on data mining algorithms such as multivariate curve resolution was developed for determination of immunosuppressant drugs of Cyclosporine-A and tacrolimus as potential toxic pollution in river water samples. This strategy is a powerful tool to the analysis of immunosuppressant drugs in complex matrices and uncalibrated interferences with the overlapped peaks. The average recoveries were between 80-120% with the average relative standard deviation of less than 5%. Therefore, the multiset modeling methods and second-order techniques hyphenated LC–MS analysis such as an LC-MS-MCR method can develop an appropriate method for the best resolution and determination of immunosuppressive drugs in different water resource.