Determination of Pharmacokinetics of Tanshinone II A in Mouse Plasma and Brain by High Performance Liquid Chromatography

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed to measure the concentration of tanshinone IIA (Ts IIA) in mouse plasma and brain. The method was applied to preliminary study on pharmacokinetics of Ts IIA in mouse plasma and brain. After an administration of 8.0 mg kg⁻¹ of Ts IIA by an intravenous injection, plasma and brain samples were collected and extracted by liquid-liquid extraction with ethyl acetate and determined by HPLC. This method has a linear range from 0.05 to 7.12 mg l⁻¹ with correlation coefficients of 0.9984 in plasma and a linear range from 0.022 to 2.37 mg l⁻¹ with correlation coefficients of 0.9988 in brain. The limits of quantitation in plasma and brain were 0.050 and 0.022 mg l⁻¹, respectively, and the limits of detection were 0.026 and 0.017 mg l⁻¹, respectively. The intra-day and inter-day precisions were less than 10.3%. The developed method was selective, accurate, and sensitive and can be applied to determine the concentration of Ts IIA in mouse plasma and brain quantitatively after intravenous administration of Ts IIA. It was suitable for the pharmacokinetic study of Ts IIA. The plasma concentration-time curve was fitted as three-compartment model. The peak concentration of Ts IIA in mouse plasma was 1.58 mg l⁻¹, and the value of the areas under the plasma concentration-time curve (AUC 0-t) was 68.18 mg l⁻¹ min⁻¹. The concentration of Ts IIA in mouse brain achieved the peak value of 0.17 mg l⁻¹ 5 min after mainlined, and Ts IIA could be still detected in brain 480 min after mainlined. The results indicated that Ts IIA readily penetrated the blood-brain barrier and could stay in the brain for a long time.