A high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry method for the determination of artemisinin in rat plasma

作者:Xing J; Yan HX; Zhang SQ*; Ren GL; Gao YH
来源:Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, 2006, 20(9): 1463-1468.
DOI:10.1002/rcm.2467

摘要

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 arternisinin in 100 mu L 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 arternisinin 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.