LC/MS/MS analysis of vesnarinone and its principal metabolites in plasma and urine

An LC/MS/MS assay was developed and successfully used to quantitate vesnarinone and its principal metabolites (OPC-8230, OPC-18136, and OPC-18137) in human plasma and urine. Samples were pre-treated with liquid-solid extraction followed by simultaneous monitoring of primary and daughter ions which were used for the identification and quantitation of the analytes on LC/MS/MS. This assay offers advantages of specificity, speed and greater sensitivity over the previously developed HPLC-UV assay. The lower limit of quantitation is 500 ng x ml(-1) for vesnarinone and 20 ng x ml(-1) for OPC-8230, OPC-18137, and OPC-18136 in plasma. Methodology is similar for the estimation of these analytes in urine with the lower limit of quantitation being 500 ng x ml(-1) for vesnarinone and 100 ng x ml(-1) for each metabolite. Ascorbic acid was added to stabilize the analytes from degradation. This LC/MS/MS method was developed to overcome many practical problems associated with the HPLC method. The LC/MS/MS method offers the flexibility of analyzing additional metabolites and changing the linearity range to accommodate the differences in linear range (200-10000 ng x ml(-1) for vesnarinone and 20-1000 for metabolites) for the analytes.