According to the World Health Organization, the second most common cause of death in society is cancer. Its treatment often includes chemotherapy with cytotoxic drugs – still very often cisplatin. Unfortunately, the limitations of its use are a lack of selectivity towards cancerous targets, which, along with highly cytotoxic properties, results in numerous severe side effects and fastly observed drug resistance. The auspicious way to overcome the mentioned obstacles is to ensure selective and effective transportation of cisplatin directly to targets using various nanomaterials as nanovehicles. A combination of nanocarrier and anticancer drugs is called a drug delivery system (DDS). The essential advantages of DDSs application in cancer treatment are the possibility of (i) extending anticancer drug circulation time in the bloodstream and (ii) slowing down metabolic changes of anticancer drugs through limited interactions with proteins. This way, standard doses of cytotoxic drugs applied in classical chemotherapy can be significantly decreased. Moreover, nanomaterials induce the preferential accumulation of drugs in tumors, which can elevate the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

To effectively investigate the DDS formation and changes, there is an acute need to monitor the final product and all constituents in the probed mixture. This way of characterizing DDS is possible by employing hyphenated techniques − combining high-performance separation modules with sensitive and analyte-specific detection of inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS).

In the frame of the presentation, CZE-ICP-MS and RP-HPLC-ICP-MS techniques will be compared as tools for direct, qualitative, and quantitative monitoring of cisplatin DDSs formation profiles during one analysis. Herein, investigated DDS were prepared based on two types of nanomaterials – non-toxic gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and biocompatible liposomes, which belong to the groups of metallic and organic nanomaterials, respectively.