Semiempirical Rules To Determine Drug Sensitivity and Ionization Efficiency in Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry Using a Model Tissue Sample

There is an increasing need in the pharmaceutical industry to reduce drug failure at late stage and thus reduce the cost of developing a new medicine. Since most drug targets are intracellular, this requires a better understanding of the drug disposition within a cell. Secondary ion mass spectrometry has been identified as a potentially important technique to do this, as it is label-free and allows imaging in 3D with subcellular resolution and recent studies have shown promise for amiodarone. An important analytical parameter is sensitivity, and we measure this in a bovine liver homogenate reference sample for 20 drugs representing important class types relevant to the pharmaceutical industry. We also measure the sensitivity for pure drug and show, for the first time, that the secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) positive ionization efficiency for small molecules is a simple power-law relationship to the log P value. This discovery will be important for advancing the understanding of the SIMS ionization...