A high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry method for the determination of artemisinin in rat plasma.
Artemisinin is a widely used antimalarial drug. To evaluate the pharmacokinetics of artemisinin in rats, a sensitive and specific liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometric (LC/MS/MS) method was developed and validated for the determination of artemisinin in rat plasma. For detection, a Sciex API 4000 LC/MS/MS instrument with an electrospray ionization (ESI) TurboIonSpray inlet in the positive ion multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode was used to monitor precursor ([M+NH4]+) --> product ions of m/z 300.4 --> 209.4 for artemisinin and m/z 316.4 --> 163.4 for artemether, the internal standard (IS). The plasma samples were pretreated by a simple liquid-liquid extraction with ether. The standard curve was linear (r > 0.99) over the artemisinin concentration range of 1.0-200.0 ng/mL in plasma. The method had a lower limit of quantification of 1.0 ng/mL for artemisinin in 100 microL of plasma, which offered a satisfactory sensitivity for the determination of artemisinin. The intra- and inter-day precisions were measured to be within +/-5.3% and accuracy between -2.6% and 1.2% for all quality control samples, lower limit of quantification and upper limit of quantification samples. The extraction recoveries of artemisinin and the IS were 95.4 +/- 4.5% and 92.8 +/- 3.9%, respectively. This present method was successfully applied to the characterization of the pharmacokinetic profile of artemisinin in rats after oral administration.
Xing
Jie
J
School of Pharmacy, Shandong University, Jinan 250012, China.
Yan
Hongxia
H
Zhang
Shuqiu
S
Ren
Guolian
G
Gao
Yanhui
Y
D000818:Animals; D000962:Antimalarials / Q000097:blood*; D037621:Artemisinins / Q000097:blood*; D002138:Calibration; D002851:Chromatography, High Pressure Liquid; D008297:Male; D011786:Quality Control; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D012015:Reference Standards; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012717:Sesquiterpenes / Q000097:blood*; D053719:Tandem Mass Spectrometry
D000962:Antimalarials; D037621:Artemisinins; D012717:Sesquiterpenes; C031327:artemisinin