Quantification of tenatoprazole in rat plasma by HPLC: validation and its application to pharmacokinetic studies

A simple, reliable HPLC method with UV detection (295 nm) in rat plasma was developed and validated for quantification of tenatoprazole, a novel proton pump inhibitor, which is in clinical trials. Following a single-step liquid-liquid extraction, the analyte and internal standard were separated using an isocratic mobile phase on a reverse phase C(18) column. The lower limit of quantitation was 20 ng/mL, with a relative standard deviation of less than 10%. A linear dynamic range of 20-6000 ng/mL was established. This HPLC method was validated with between-batch and within-batch precision of 2.9-6.3 and 1.4-5.8%, respectively. The between-batch and within-batch accuracy was 95.1-104.1 and 92.4-101.0%, respectively. This validated method is simple and repeatable enough to be used in pharmacokinetic studies.