Serum albumin is the most abundant protein (ca. 0.6 mM) in the blood, and it possesses strong ability to bind a large number of endogenous as well as exogenous substances. Thus, most of drugs administered are bound to serum albumin and are transported in the bound state in the circulating blood. It is also well known that the pharmacological activity of a drug is closely related to the free drug concentration in the blood. Therefore, the binding of drugs to serum albumin is pharmacokinetically and pharmacologically very important and has been extensively investigated.2,3) However, less is known about the binding of cationic drugs to albumin, as it has been recognized that serum albumin binds both neutral and anionic drugs, whereas a 1 -acid glycoprotein binds cationic drugs.
2,3)However, we previously showed that chlorpromazine (CPZ) and triflupromazine (TFZ), both phenothiazine drugs that are widely prescribed psychotropic agents, bind to bovine serum albumin (BSA) with binding constants (K values) on the order of 10 4 M
Ϫ1, despite the fact that these drugs are positively charged at the physiological pH of 7.4. 4) Furthermore, based on the results of an 19 F-NMR study of TFZ which has a CF 3 group on the phenothiazine ring, we recently reported that TFZ exhibits two different types of binding to BSA and human serum albumin (HSA). One of these binding modes is specific to Sudlow's Site II, and the other is regarded as nonspecific binding.5) Also, we demonstrated that the addition of 0.15 M NaCl displaced the bound TFZ from Site II.
5)Under physiological conditions, 0.15 M of Na ϩ and 0.1 M of Cl Ϫ are present in the blood; therefore, it is very important to conduct quantitative investigations of the effects of inorganic ions on the binding constants of the phenothiazines to albumin. In the present study, we used a second-derivative spectrophotometric method to investigate the effects of NaCl, NaBr, NaI, Na 2 SO 4 , KCl, KBr, and KI on the binding ability of BSA for TFZ and CPZ. The second-derivative spectrophotometric method used here has been applied for the determination of binding constants 4) and partition coefficients 6-8) of drugs to biological substances without requiring any separation procedures, since the derivative spectrophotometric methods [9][10][11][12] can eliminate the effects of background signals, enhance subtle spectral features, and allow the resolution of overlapped bands.Furthermore, by using 19 F-NMR spectroscopy, the effects of these salts on the binding of TFZ to BSA were investigated with respect to the binding site.
ExperimentalData Analysis If the effect of residual background signals is entirely eliminated in the derivative spectrum, the derivative intensity (D) of a phenothiazine drug in a sample solution at a specific wavelength is represented as follows: By rearranging Eq. 1, DD is introduced asThe DD represents the derivative intensity difference before and after the addition of BSA to a drug solution containing an inorganic salt, and its value is The effects of inorganic salts...