Enhancing the Practicality along with Greenness Sustainability of a High Throughput HPLC-MS/MS Bioanalytical Method for the Simultaneous Determination of Amlodipine, Perindopril, and Its Active Metabolite Perindoprilat in Human Plasma: Application to a Pharmacokinetic Study

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of amlodipine and perindopril combination therapy in decreasing blood pressure and improving outcomes for high-risk patients. In order to assess the pharmacokinetics of the 2 drugs along with perindoprilat; the active metabolite of perindopril, a simultaneous LC-MS/MS quantification method of amlodipine (AML), perindopril (PER) and perindoprilat (LAT) in human plasma has been developed and validated using amlodipine D4, perindopril D4 and perindoprilat D4 as internal standards (ISs), respectively. A simple and fast protein precipitation method was used to analyze the three analytes from K3EDTA human plasma. The chromatographic separation included the use of a mixture of methanol and acetonitrile (80:20, v/v) and 0.2% aqueous formic acid (60:40, v/v) as a mobile phase pumped onto a Zorbax® SB-AQ C18 column. Detection was carried out using a tandem mass spectrometer (MS/MS) in multiple reactions monitoring (MRM) mode. This method exhibited great sensitivity (LLOQ of 0.2 ng/mL for AML and PER and 0.4 ng/mL for LAT), linearity, accuracy (ranging from 97.64% to 110.28%), precision (ranging from 2.54% to 7.60%), and stability. The method showed good linearity over the range of (0.2-10 ng/mL) for AML, (0.2-160 ng/mL) for PER and (0.4-80 ng/mL) for LAT. The average extraction recoveries of AML, PER and LAT samples were between 81.92 % and 85.07%. Total elution time was as low as 3 min only. In addition, to ensure the practicality of the developed method, BAGI tool was applied, and the current method has achieved the highest score among the compared methods. Moreover, the sustainability of the proposed method was evaluated using AGREE tool and RGB 12 paradigm showing remarkable sustainability. The developed method is fast, accurate, sensitive, reproducible, ecofriendly, sustainable and suitable for the determination of the concentration of the cited analytes in human plasma. Moreover, it was applied for the bioequivalence study of a generic product to the innovator.