New Highly-Sensitive Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry Method for Quantification of Telmisartan in Human Plasma

Purpose: To develop and validate a simple, rapid, sensitive and specific ultraperformance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry method for the quantification of the angiotensin II receptor antagonist, telmisartan (TEL), in human plasma.
Methods: After simple protein precipitation using acetonitrile and methanol, TEL and internal standard (IS) abiraterone were separated on Acquity UPLC BEH^TM C18 column (50 x 2.1 mm, i.d. 1.7 μm, Waters, USA) using a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile: 8 mM ammonium acetate containing 0.15 % formic acid (v/v) (70:30) pumped at a flow rate of 0.3 mL/min and detected by tandem mass spectrometry with positive ion mode. The ion transitions recorded in multiple reaction monitoring mode were m/z 515.27→276.13 for telmisartan and m/z 350.1 > 156.0 for internal standard, abiraterone.
Results: The assay exhibited a linear dynamic range of 1 – 200 ng/mL for telmisartan in human plasma with good correlation coefficient (0.995) and limit of quantitation of 1 ng/mL. The relative standard deviation for the intra- and inter-assay precision was between 0.75-11.50
Conclusion: The developed UPLC-MS/MS method is simple, rapid and highly sensitive, and should thus be suitable for pharmacokinetic and toxicokinetic studies in both animals and humans.

Keywords
Telmisartan; Ultra-Performance liquid chromatography; Tandem mass spectrometry; Pharmacokinetics; Toxicokinetics; High throughput analysis