Comparison of three chemometric methods for processing HPLC-DAD data with time shifts: Simultaneous determination of ten molecular targeted anti-tumor drugs in different biological samples

Three intelligent chemometric multi-way calibration methods including alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD), alternating trilinear decomposition assisted multivariate curve resolution (ATLD-MCR) and multivariate curve resolution-alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) combined with high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLC-DAD) were used to quantify ten molecular targeted anti-tumor drugs in three complex biological matrices (plasma, urine and cell culture media matrices). All analytes can be successfully eluted in 6.5 min. In this experiment, various degrees of time shifts occurred in different samples. While slight time shifts exist in the chromatographic analysis, satisfactory results can be obtained by the three proposed methods. When the time shift was large (5.6 s), the average spiked recoveries obtained by ATLD analysis were in the range of 58.9%–116.5%, which was less than satisfactory. However, the average recoveries obtained by MCR-ALS and ATLD-MCR analysis were 89.8%–114.8% and 84.5%–106.1% respectively, and more satisfactory results were obtained. For further research, ATLD-MCR and MCR-ALS methods were compared, and the results were evaluated by statistical tests. Accuracies of concentrations obtained by them were considered to be no significant difference. In addition, compared with other methods currently published, the proposed chemometric methods combined with the HPLC-DAD can rapidly, simultaneously and accurately determine varieties of molecular targeted anti-tumor drugs in different complex biological matrices even in the presence of severe peak overlaps, severe time shifts, slight baseline drifts and different unknown background interferences.