Quantitation of eleven active compounds of Aidi injection in rat plasma and its application to comparative pharmacokinetic study

Aidi injection has been widely used for the treatment of colorectal cancer. The purpose of this study was to develop a sensitive and reliable method for simultaneous quantitation of 11 main active ingredients in Aidi injection and to compare the pharmacokinetics of these ingredients in normal and colorectal model cancer rats after tail vein injection. After being extracted by isopropanol-ethyl acetate (1:1, v/v), the plasma samples were analyzed with domperidone as internal standard. Then the analytes were separated on a Venusil MP C18 column with 0.15% formic acid and methanol. The detection was performed on HPLC–MS/MS system with turbo ion spray source in the positive ion and multiple reaction-monitoring mode. The assay was shown to be linear over the range of 0.004–4.0 μg mL−1 of syringin B, astragaloside II and isofraxidin; 0.01–10.0 μg mL−1 of calycosin-7-O-β-d-glucoside and astragaloside IV; 0.02–20.0 μg mL−1 of ginsenoside Rg1, Rb1, Rc and Rd; 0.04–40.0 μg mL−1 of syringin E; 0.06–60.0 μg mL−1 of ginsenoside Re. And the validated method has been successfully applied to compare pharmacokinetic profiles of the 11 ingredients in plasma. The pharmacokinetic results showed here were significant differences in pharmacokinetic parameters for eight analytes between two groups after injection, while no significant differences for astragaloside II, astragaloside IV and ginsenoside Rc. The present study has the advantages of short analysis time and easy sample preparation, which could more comprehensively reflect the quality of Aidi injection in single run. The method proposed could be of great use for pharmacokinetics, bioavailability or bioequivalence studies of Aidi injection in biological samples.