Question

You are employed at a biotech company, working on a new drug, named ABC. Your boss wants to know how this compound move into red blood cells, and what its concentration will be in red blood cells. He has provided you with plenty of samples of drug ABC, and you have the means to measure its concentration inside red blood cells. He has now asked you for a protocol.

Provide protocols to test:

1. The drug will move into red blood cells by diffusion, but may be metabolized to another compound over time.

Be as precise as necessary in the data that you will collect.

Answer 1

Given information,
A drug, ABC is uptaken by RBC and is metabolized to an unknown compound 'X' over time.
The aim is to measure the steady-state levels of ABC inside RBC.

Procedure:
There are two methods.
1. We can use a chemical method.
Identify the chemical properties of ABC.
Isolate RBC from the organism to the highest purity.
Perform mass-spectrometry to identify the quantity of ABC over time.
The same can be done using a derivative of ABC. Let's assume that ABC reacts with a compound 'P' and produces 'Q' which may be easily quantifiable.

2. We can use a spectrometer to identify the concentration of the compound.
For this, we need to know the absorption maxima of ABC or its chemical derivative.
Using a standard curve, we can measure the concentration of the unknown sample.