Development and validation for high selective quantitative determination of metformin in human plasma by cation exchanging with normal-phase LC/MS/MS

An assay based on cation exchange solid-phase extraction and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS) has been developed for the quantitative determination of metformin in human plasma. The analytical method consists of cation exchange solid-phase extraction (VersaPlate CBA) without any further evaporation/dissolution steps and cation exchange-based HPLC separation (Capcell Pak SCX column) with a normal-phase gradient system followed by semi-micro LC/MS/MS in positive ion selected reaction monitoring mode using electrospray ionization. The method exhibited excellent performance in terms of selectivity, robustness, short run time (7 min/sample) and simplicity of sample preparation.

The calibration range was 10–1000 ng/ml with 0.2 ml of plasma. Intra- and inter-day mean accuracies were within the ranges of 100.3–105.0% and 101.2–105.3%, respectively. Intra- and inter-day precisions were within the ranges of 0.8–1.9% and 1.5–8.6%, respectively. Mean absolute recovery was 67.0% for metformin. No apparent loss of metformin after extraction was observed in an autosampler at 10 °C for 24 h. Dilution of metformin by blank human plasma up to 20-fold was tested and revealed no impact on the results of determination. Furthermore, the method exhibited high selectivity, since no effect on metformin analysis was observed on comparison of samples with or without nateglinide and other agents in plasma. Results obtained with the method were also comparable to a published LC–UV method on cross-validation.

This method can be applied to various clinical pharmacokinetic studies of metformin.