To develop and verify a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method for determining contezolid in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Protein precipitation was performed on samples using linezolid as the internal standard. We used an Agilent EclipsePlus C18 column operating at 0.4 mL/min in conjunction with acetonitrile and water mobile phases for the LC-MS/MS analysis. Using the precursor-product ion pairs 409.15→269.14 (contezolid) and 338.14→195.1 (linezolid), multiple reaction monitoring was used to quantify the compounds. Plasma linearity range was 50.0 to 5000 ng/mL, and CSF was 20.0 to 1000 ng/mL (r2 = 0.999). The inter-batch and intra-batch precisions were ≤2.57% and ≤5.79%, respectively. Plasma recovered 92.94%, and CSF recovered 97.83%. Plasma, CSF, hemolytic plasma, and hyperlipidemic plasma all showed a coefficient of variation ≤ 7.44%. The stability and dilution integrity of this method were also acceptable. The study also demonstrated that artificial CSF can be used as a matrix for the preparation of standard curve samples. A simple and accurate method was developed and validated for the determination of contezolid concentrations in human plasma and CSF, which may be useful for monitoring the therapeutic effect of central nervous system medications.
Keywords: CSF; LC-MS/MS; contezolid; plasma.