Novel Method for the Extraction of Cocaine from Oral Fluid by Means of Disposable Pipette Modified with Restricted Access Material

This study proposes a new, efficient, and selective method for the analysis of cocaine in oral fluid. For this purpose, an extractive phase with restricted access materials (RAM) capable of extract and pre-concentrate low molecular weight analytes and simultaneously exclude macromolecules was developed for disposable pipette extraction (DPX) followed by liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analyses. The proposed method was optimized using a 2⁴ factorial design which pointed higher extraction efficiency under the following conditions: pH 9, 10 cycles of extraction (aspirate/dispense), 3 cycles of desorption (aspirate/dispense) and acetonitrile as desorption solvent. The DPX-RAM/LC-MS method showed linearity range from 10 to 100 ng mL^-1 with determination coefficient (R²) = 0.999, accuracy values ranged from -0.9 to 4.3%, precision values ranged from 1.7 to 9.1% and recovery values ranged from 97.9 to 101.1%. The benefits of this method are that it can be performed in few minutes and that the analytical performances, including the limit of detection (3.13 ng mL^-1), limit of quantitation (10 ng mL^-1) and linear range were found to be in agreement with other methods used for similar analysis.

Keywords:
cocaine; restricted access materials; disposable pipette extraction; desorption; validation