LC–MS/MS Bioanalysis of Radioligand Therapeutic Drug Candidate for Preclinical Toxicokinetic Assessment

Radioligand therapy (RLT) has gained significant momentum in recent years in the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of cancers. In preclinical development, the safety profile of RLT drug candidate(s) is investigated at relatively low dose levels using the cold (non-radioactive, e.g., 175Lu) ligand as a surrogate of the hot (radioactive, e.g., 177Lu) one in the “ligand-linker-chelator” complex. The formulation of the test article used in preclinical safety studies contains a mixture of free ligand (i.e., ligand-linker-chelator without metal) and cold ligand (i.e., ligand-linker-chelator with non-radioactive metal) in a similar molar ratio as seen under the manufacturing conditions for the RLT drug for clinical use, where only a fraction of free ligand molecules chelate the radioactive metal to form a hot ligand. In this very first report of LC–MS/MS bioanalysis of RLT molecules in support of a regulated preclinical safety assessment study, a highly selective and sensitive LC–MS/MS bioanalytical method was developed for the simultaneous determination of free ligand (NVS001) and cold ligand (175Lu-NVS001) in rat and dog plasma. Several unexpected technical challenges in relation to LC–MS/MS of RLT molecules were successfully addressed. The challenges include poor assay sensitivity of the free ligand NVS001, formation of the free ligand (NVS001) with endogenous metal (e.g., potassium), Ga loss from the Ga-chelated internal standard during sample extraction and analysis, “instability” of the analytes at low concentrations, and inconsistent IS response in the extracted plasma samples. The methods were validated according to the current regulatory requirements in a dynamic range of 0.5–250 ng/mL for both the free and cold ligands using a 25 μL sample volume. The validated method was successfully implemented in sample analysis in support of regulated safety studies, with very good results from incurred sample reanalysis. The current LC–MS/MS workflow can be expanded to quantitative analysis of other RLTs in support of preclinical RLT drug development.