Determination of an investigational HIV integrase inhibitor in human plasma using high performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometric detection

An HPLC–MS/MS assay for the determination of an HIV integrase inhibitor, 5-(1,1-dioxido-1,2-thiazinan-2-yl)-N-(4-fluorobenzyl)-8-hydroxy-1,6-naphthyridine-7-carboxamide (I) in human plasma has been developed and validated. Compound I and a stable isotope labeled internal standard (II) were isolated from 0.5 mL plasma samples by solid phase extraction using an Ansys SPEC C-8 96-well plate. Extracts were separated on a Hypersil BDS C-18 HPLC column (3.0 mm × 50 mm, 3 μm) with a mobile phase consisting of 25 mM ammonium formate pH 3.0:acetonitrile (60:40) vol%/vol% pumped at 0.5 mL/min. A Sciex API 365 mass spectrometer equipped with an atmospheric pressure chemical ionization source was operated in selected reaction monitoring (SRM) mode with the precursor-to-product ion transitions m/z 431 → 109 (I) and m/z 437 → 115 (II) used for quantitation. The assay was validated over the concentration range of 10–5000 ng/mL and was found to have acceptable accuracy, precision, linearity, and selectivity. The mean extraction recovery from spiked plasma samples was 69%. The intra-day accuracy of the assay was within 4% of nominal and intra-day precision was better than 4% C.V. Following a 200 mg dose of the compound administered to human subjects, concentrations of I ranged from 21.1 to 1500 ng/mL in plasma samples collected up to 12 h after dosing. Inter-day accuracy and precision results for quality control samples run over a 3-month period alongside clinical samples showed mean accuracies of within 6% of nominal and precision better than 3.5% C.V.