Dapagliflozin (DAPA), sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 (SGLT-2) inhibitor, is used to treat Type 2 diabetes. In this study, a highly sensitive and selective analytical method based on ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (UHPLC-HRMS) was established and validated for the determination of DAPA in rat plasma. The separation of DAPA and internal standard (DAPA-d5) were performed on a reversed-phase ACQUITY UPLC® BEH C18 column (100 × 3.0 mm, 1.7 µm). The mobile phase is composed of 0.1% formic acid in water (solvent A) and methanol (solvent B) in gradient elution. Under the negative ion mode, full MS/dd-MS2 was adopted to collect data via Q-Orbitrap. DAPA was effectively separated from matrix backgrounds within 10 min, and DAPA in plasma showed a good linear relationship in the range of 10-10000 µg/L. The determination coefficient (R2) was 0.9987, and the lower limit of quantification (LLOQ) was 10 µg/L. The precision and accuracy were all less than 10%, and the extraction recovery of DAPA was 86.16-96.06% from plasma. This study offered an efficient separation and quantification method for DAPA. The improved and validated method succeeded in evaluating the pharmacokinetics of DAPA in rat plasma samples after a single oral administration of 1 mg/kg.
Keywords: Dapagliflozin; pharmacokinetics; rat; ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC)-Q-Orbitrap MS.