A 96-well single-pot liquid-liquid extraction, hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method for the determination of muraglitazar in human plasma

A single-pot liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) with hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (HILIC/MS/MS) method has been developed and validated for the determination of muraglitazar, a hydrophobic diabetes drug, in human plasma. To 0.050 ml of each plasma sample in a 96-well plate, the internal standard solution in acetonitrile and toluene were added to extract the compound of interest. The plate was vortexed, followed by centrifugation. The organic layer was then directly injected into an LC/MS/MS system. Chromatographic separation was achieved isocratically on a Thermohypersil_Keystone, Hypersil silica column (3 mm × 50 mm, 3 μm). The mobile phase contained 85% of methyl t-butyl ether and 15% of 90/10 (v/v) acetonitrile/water with 0.3% trifluoroacetic acid. Post-column mobile phase of 50/50 (v/v) acetonitrile/water containing 0.1% formic acid was added. Detection was by positive ion electrospray tandem mass spectrometry on a Sciex API 4000. The standard curve, ranged from 1 to 1000 ng/ml, was fitted to a 1/x weighted quadratic regression model. This single-pot LLE approach effectively eliminated time-consuming organic layer transfer, dry-down, and sample reconstitution steps, which are essential for a conventional liquid-liquid extraction procedure. The modified mobile phase was more compatible with the direct injection of the commonly used extraction solvents in LLE. Furthermore, the modified mobile phase improved the retention of muraglitazar, a hydrophobic compound, on the normal phase silica column. The validation results demonstrated that this method was rugged and suitable for analyzing muraglitazar in human plasma. In comparison with a revised-phase LC/MS/MS method, this single-pot LLE, HILIC/MS/MS method improved the detection sensitivity by more than four-fold based upon the LLOQ signal to noise ratio. This approach may be applied to other hydrophobic compounds with proper modification of the mobile phase compositions.