A reliable and stable method for determination of brigatinib in rat plasma by UPLC-MS/MS: Application to a pharmacokinetic study

- Developed a method to determine brigatinib by UPLC-MS/MS.
- This method was reliable, specified, stable and rapid.
- This method can be used in pharmacokinetic studies.

Brigatinib is the second-generation anaplastic lymphoma kinase - inhibitor in non-small cell lung cancer and it can overcome the crizotinib-resistance. Chromatographic separation was carried out on an Acquity Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC) unit with a BEH C18 column (2.1 mm × 50 mm, 1.7 μm). The mobile phase was composed of acetonitrile and 0.1% formic acid in water. No endogenous interfering compounds was discovered at retention time of brigatinib (0.56 min) and imatinib (IS, 1.41 min). MS/MS detection was performed in positive mode. And the MRM transitions were m/z 584.09 → 484.08 and m/z 494.3 → 394.2 for brigatinib and IS, respectively. This method was assessed to be stable, specificity, and no matrix effect in three concentrations (0.004, 0.4, 4 μg/mL). The intra-day and inter-day precisions were less than 11.09% and 6.43%. And intra-day and inter-day accuracies were ranged from −3.88% to 5.44%. The recovery of brigatinib was from 85.26% to 96.05%. Additionally, the method had a good linearity in the range of 0.002-5 μg/mL. The presented method was effectively implemented to determine the concentration of brigatinib in rat plasma.