Determination of rabeprazole enantiomers and their metabolites by high-performance liquid chromatography with solid-phase extraction

Here, we describe the development of a rapid, simple and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for the simultaneous quantitative determination of rabeprazole enantiomers (1a,b) and their metabolites, rabeprazole-thioether (2) and rabeprazole sulfone (3), in human plasma. Analytes and the internal standard (omeprazole-thioether) were separated using a mobile phase of 0.5 M NaClO4–acetonitrile (6:4, v/v) over a Chiral CD-Ph column. Analysis required only 100 μl of plasma and involved solid-phase extraction with an Oasis HLB cartridge, which gave high recovery (>91.8%) with good selectivity for all analytes. The lower limit of quantification was 5 ng/ml for analytes 1a, 1b and 3 and 10 ng/ml for 2. Linearity of this assay was determined to lie between 5 and 1000 ng/ml for 1a, 1b and 3 and 10 and 1000 ng/ml for 2 (r2 > 0.982 of the regression line). Inter- and intra-day coefficients of variation were less than 7.8% and accuracies were within 8.4% over the linear range for all analytes. Our results indicate that this method is applicable to the simultaneous monitoring of plasma levels of rabeprazole enantiomers and associated metabolites in human plasma.