Amalgamation of stress degradation and metabolite profiling in rat urine and feces for characterization of oxidative metabolites of flibanserin using UHPLC-Q-TOF-MS/MS, H/D exchange and NMR technique

Flibanserin (FLB) is the first FDA approved drug showed to have significant activity against sexual desire disorder of premenopausal and postmenopausal women. Unfortunately, FLB is used as an adulterant in dietary supplement products as a performance enhancer in sports. Identification of FLB and its metabolites in the biological samples requires an authenticated analytical technique. The aim of this study was to identify N-oxide metabolite of FLB in microsomal and S9 human liver enzyme fractions, rat urine and feces. There are several N-oxide reported as genotoxic impurity or reactive metabolites based on position of N-oxide in piperazine ring. This study also describes the strategy to utilize degradation chemistry for isolation of N-oxide and its step-wise characterization. An LC-MS method has been developed and employed for identifying the N-oxide metabolite of FLB. The targeted N-oxide metabolite in the extracted ion chromatogram of the in vitro and in vivo samples has been confirmed by analyzing the changes in observed mass at m/z 407.1693. Major distinguished abundant ions at m/z 243.1104, 190.0974, 161.0705, 119.0601 confirmed the structure of the metabolite. This study will help to understand the oxidative potential of FLB in toxicokinetic study. The developed method can be useful to identify FLB or its N-oxide metabolite in dope testing in future. This is the first time to report a strategy to utilize degradation chemistry for N-oxide metabolite characterization. In this study, isolated N-oxidative degradation product was used to confirm N-oxide metabolite which was characterized by LC-MS through H/D exchange and structure was ensured by NMR spectroscopy (1H, COSY).