An Update on Recently Developed Analytical and Bio-analytical Methods for Some Anticancer Drugs

According to the WHO’s data for 2018, the global cancer burden was estimated to have risen to 18.1 million new cases and which alone accounted for 9.6 million deaths. Cancer is a group of diseases known as tumors that often spreads throughout the body, and may cause harm to multiple organs in the body. The global pharmaceutical spending is around 19% of the R&D cost annually to discover new and potent therapeutic agents. The major problems associated with currently available anticancer drugs are drug resistance and their side effects. They are the most widely explored groups of drugs either using instrumental or bioanalytical methods. In this review, we have compiled and reviewed the analytical and bio-analytical methods of some anticancer drugs developed by different authors. The review also briefly discusses the broad categories of cytotoxic drugs and targeted-based anticancer drugs. The analytical and bioanalytical methods of cytotoxic drugs such as alkylating agents, antimetabolites, hormones, and targetedbased drugs reported earlier and in recent research, articles are discussed in detail. These analytical methods are prerequisites for both the pharmaceutical industry and academics for their impurities profiling and qualitative as well as quantitative estimation. The accuracy, precision, LOD, and LOQ studies by UV-HPLC, LC-MS, and fluorometry HPLC are discussed. Some of the advanced methods developed, in the case of ifosfamide using Au/Pd@rGO@p(L-Cys) and the production of vincristine by endophytic fungi, are also included. This will further embolden the efforts of different researchers working in this field and ease the challenges they face through the analytical development of these drugs.