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Background Chemotherapy drugs are widely used to treat cancer, but their active compounds represent a danger for workers who could be exposed to them. However, they aren’t yet included in directive CE No. 1272/2008 and the European Biosafety Network has only recommended a limit value of 100 pg/cm 2 for surface contamination. Thus, it is crucial to assess surface contaminations in healthcare environments. Currently, the technique of choice is surface wipe test combined with liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry to achieve high sensibility. Material and Methods A campaign involving Careggi University Hospital (Florence, Italy) was performed from January 2020 to December 2021, collecting 1449 wipe samples between administration units, preparation unit, and personnel gloves. From the obtained data, the 90th percentile was calculated for 30 antiblastic drugs and proposed as surface exposure levels (SELs); while from data concerning personnel glove contamination, weekly contamination was estimated. Results In the 2-year period only 417 wipe samples were found positive (28.8%), the majority of which regard samples coming from administration unit bathrooms. The proposed SELs are almost all

Despite the considerable steps taken in the last decade in the context of antineoplastic drug (AD) handling procedures, their mutagenic effect still poses a threat to healthcare personnel actively involved in compounding and administration units. Biological monitoring procedures usually require large volumes of sample and extraction solvents, or do not provide adequate sensitivity. It is here proposed a fast and automated method to evaluate the urinary levels of cyclophosphamide and iphosphamide, composed of a miniaturized solid phase extraction (µSPE) followed by ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) analysis. The extraction procedure, developed through design of experiments (DoE) on the ePrep One Workstation, required a total time of 9.5 min per sample, with recoveries of 77–79% and a solvent consumption lower than 1.5 mL per 1 mL of urine sample. Thanks to the UHPLC-MS/MS method, the limits of quantification (LOQ) obtained were lower than 10 pg/mL. The analytical procedure was successfully applied to 23 urine samples from compounding wards of four Italian hospitals, which resulted in contaminations between 27 and 182 pg/mL.

Antineoplastic drugs are a wide and heterogeneous group of substances that, as universally known, can cause highly severe toxic effects to whoever is exposed. From an occupational safety point of view, surface contaminations inside preparation and administration units are a growing issue and therefore require the development and implementation of sensible and fast monitoring methods. The unlikelihood of a unique all-embracing chromatography, able to correctly retain and separate each analyte led to the need to create an orthogonal normal phase analysis, which might be able to fill the gaps in the more common reversed-phase ones. An existing hydrophilic interaction method has thus been expanded to 6 other drugs and applied to real samples after an evaluation of its performances. The experimental data were then used to evaluate the possibility of estimating reliable relationships between the chromatographic retention and the chemical-structural features of the drugs under analysis.

Growing attention on carcinogenicity and mutagenicity of antineoplastic drugs (ADs) from the International Agencies has led to the present strict safe handling and administration regulations. Accordingly, one of the most common ways to assess occupational exposure to these substances is to identify and quantify possible surface contamination inside hospital preparation and administration units. Thus, it is essential to develop a fast and high-throughput monitoring method capable of identifying a significant number of ADs. The present study reports developing a UHPLC–MS/MS analysis to screen 26 ADs surface contamination through wipe test sampling. A Cortecs UPLC T3 50 × 2.1 mm (1.6 µm) column was selected to perform the analysis, using the evaluations of previous studies and the Product Quality Research Institute (PQRI) database. The design of experiments (DoE) methodological approach was used to optimize the chromatographic conditions concerning the best separation between all ADs. The limits of quantification for the analytes were between the pg/mL and ng/mL orders, and the turnaround time was limited to about 15 min. The obtained accuracy was mostly between 90% and 110% for all the analytes, while the precision was under 10% and a low matrix effect was observed for said analytes. Only vindesine and docetaxel presented lower performances.