High‐performance liquid chromatography method for determination of carnosic acid in rat plasma and its application to pharmacokinetic study

A sensitive and reproducible high‐performance liquid chromatography method with ultraviolet detection (UV) was developed for the determination of carnosic acid (CA) in rat plasma. After simple acidification and liquid–liquid extraction of plasma samples using gemfibrozil as an internal standard, the supernatant was evaporated to dryness under a gentle stream of nitrogen. The residue was reconstituted in 200 µL before being injected into the chromatographic system. The analysis was performed on a C₁₈ column protected by an ODS guard column using acetonitrile–0.1% phosphoric acid (55:45, v/v) as mobile phase, and the wavelength of the UV detector was set at 210 nm. The calibration curve was linear over the range of 0.265–265.0 µg/mL with a correlation coefficient of 0.9997. The recovery for plasma samples of 0.530, 13.25, 132.5 and 265.0 µg/mL was 72.2, 87.9, 90.4 and 94.7%, respectively. The intra‐day and inter‐day relative standard deviations for the measurements of quality control samples were less than 3.1%. The stability of the plasma samples was also validated. This method was successfully used to study the pharmacokinetics and bioavailability of CA in rats. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.