Towards therapeutic drug monitoring of antibiotic levels - analyzing the pharmacokinetics of levofloxacin using DUV-resonance Raman spectroscopy.

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) plays an important role in clinical practice. Here, pharmacokinetics has a decisive influence on the effective antibiotic concentration during treatment. Moreover, different kinetics exist for different administration forms. Accordingly, adjusting the correct concentration depends, in addition to gender, age, weight, clinical picture, etc., on the dosage form of the antibiotic. This study investigates the capability of deep UV resonance Raman spectroscopy (DUV-RRS) to simulate the pharmacokinetics of fluoroquinolone levofloxacin after two different administration forms (intravenous and oral). Three different pre-processing methods were applied, and the best agreement with the simulation was achieved using the extended multiplicative scatter correction. The resulting spectra were used for partial least squares (PLS) regression and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The kinetic parameters were compared with the simulated data, with PLS showing the best performance for intravenous administration and a comparable result to OLS for oral administration, while the errors are smaller. The acquired results show the potential of DUV-RRS in combination with PLS regression as a promising supportive method for TDM.