摘要
Artemisinin is a potent anti-malarial drug isolated from traditional Chinese medicinal herb, Artemisia annua. The objective of this study was to develop and validate a sensitive and specific LC-MS/MS method for the determination of artemisinin in rat plasma using amlodipine as Internal Standard. The method consist of a simple liquid-liquid extraction with methyl tertiary butyl ether （MTBE） with subsequent evaporation of the supernatant to dryness followed by the analysis of the reconstituted sample by LC-MS/？vIS with a Z-spray atmospheric pressure ionization （API） interface in the positive ion-multiple reaction monitoring mode to monitor precursor--〉product ions of m/z 282.70--〉m/z 209.0 for artemisinin and m/z 408.9--〉m/z 237.0 for amlodipine respectively. The method was linear （0.999） over the concentration range of 7.8-2000 ng/mL in rat plasma. The intra and inter-day accuracy were measured to be within 94-104.2% and precision （CV） were all less than 5%. The extraction recovery means for internal standard and all the artemisinin concentrations used were between 82-85%.
