Quantification of leonurine, a novel potential cardiovascular agent, in rat plasma by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry and its application to pharmacokinetic study in rats

摘要: Leonurine (SCM-198), an alkaloid from Herba Leonuri, has been suggested as a novel cardiovascular agent by pharmacology studies in preclinical stage. In present study, we report simple, rapid and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry method (HPLC-MS/MS) for determination of leonurine rat plasma. its internal standard (IS) n-benzoyl-l-arginine ethyl ester (BAEE) were extracted plasma samples one-step protein precipitation with perchloric acid. Chromatographic separation was performed on Agilent Zorbax SB-C18 column (150 × 2.1 mm, 5 µm) using isocratic elution acetonitrile–ammonium acetate buffer (10 mm, pH 4.0; 25:75, v/v) mobile phase at flow rate 0.2 mL/min. Analytes detected tandem positive electrospray ionization (ESI) mode multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) the transitions m/z 312.3  181.1 307.2  104.6 IS. The calibration curves linear over range 4–256 ng/mL lower limit quantitation (LLOQ) 4 ng/mL. intra- inter-day assay precision (as relative deviation) <15%, except which LLOQ <20%, accuracy 98.73-105.42%. validated HPLC-MS/MS successfully applied to pharmacokinetic study rats following oral administration leonurine. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.