Nateglinide quantification in rabbit plasma by HPLC: optimization and application to pharmacokinetic study

A rapid, simple, and sensitive HPLC method with UV detection was developed and validated for the determination of nateglinide (NTG) from rabbit plasma. The retention behavior of NTG and gliclazide (GLZ, internal standard-IS) as a function of mobile phase pH, composition and flow rate was investigated. Separation was developed on a reverse-phase C(18) column (250 mm x 4.6mm i.d., 5 microm particle size), using a mixture of acetonitrile (ACN):10mM phosphate buffer (PBS, pH 3.0) in the ratio of 70:30(%v/v) at a flow rate of 1.0 ml/min with UV detection at 203 nm within 8 min, and quantified based on drug/IS peak area ratios. The plasma samples were prepared by a simple deproteinization with a mixture of methanol and acetonitrile, yielding more than 97.86% extraction efficiencies. The calibration curve was linear (correlation coefficient of 0.9984) in the concentration range of 10-2500 ng/ml. The limit of detection (LoD) and limit of quantitation (LoQ) were found to be 2.91 and 9.70 ng/ml, respectively. Both the intra-day and inter-day precisions at four tested concentrations were below 1.32% R.S.D. The present method was selective enough to analyze NTG in rabbit plasma without any tedious sample clean-up procedure and was successfully applied for estimating the pharmacokinetic parameters of NTG following oral administration of a single 15 mg NTG to white albino rabbits.