2018 Volume 67 Issue 5 Pages 722-726
As the mammalian (mechanistic) target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors, everolimus is an immunosuppressive agent to be used in transplantation. The therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of everolimus is essential to prevent acute cellular rejection and to limit toxicity. For therapeutic drug monitoring, pre-everolimus dosing concentrations are measured in whole blood mainly by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). However, LC-MS/MS for everolimus TDM is not widely used in hospitals owing to either a lack of mass spectrometry instrumentation or resources for assay development. Recently, an everolimus reagent kit for latex particle-enhanced turbidimetric immunoassay (LTIA) has been developed. However, the everolimus concentrations measured by LTIA were lower than those determined by LC-MS/MS. We evaluated the measurement performance of a new everolimus reagent kit by electrochemiluminescence immunoassay (ECLIA). Within-run and day-to-day run reproducibilities were satisfactory. The correlation between values of LTIA and ECLIA was y = 1.24x + 1.48 (r = 0.854). In conclusion, the measurement of everolimus concentration by ECLIA has been proven satisfactory as it provides reliable results for the TDM of everolimus.
