Simultaneous determination of clevidipine and its primary metabolite in dog plasma by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry: Application to pharmacokinetic study.

A simple and rapid liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method was developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of clevidipine and its primary metabolite H152/81 in dog plasma after protein precipitation with acetonitrile using felodipine as the internal standard (IS). Chromatographic separation was performed on a XB C18 column (2.1mm×50mm, 3.5μm) under isocratic conditions with the mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile and 20mM ammonium acetate buffer (pH 7.0) (40:60, v/v) at the flow rate of 0.3ml/min. The run time was 5.5min. Mass spectrometric analysis was performed on a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer operated in the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode with the transitions of m/z 473.0→338.2 for clevidipine, m/z 356.1→324.0 for H152/81 and m/z 383.9→338.2 for the IS. The method was fully validated in terms of selectivity, linearity, lower limit of quantification (LLOQ), accuracy, precision, stability, matrix effect and recovery over a concentration range of 0.15-200ng/ml for clevidipine and 10-2000ng/ml for H152/81, respectively. The analytical method was applied to support a pharmacokinetic study of simultaneous determination of clevidipine and H152/81 in ten healthy beagle dogs.