Pharmacokinetic Comparisons of Eight Active Components from Raw Farfarae Flos and Honey-Processed Farfarae Flos after Oral Administration in Rats by UHPLC-MS/MS Approaches

Abstract

Farfarae flos (FF) is widely used for cough over thousands of years in China, but little is known about their pharmacokinetics properties. This study was aimed to establish a rapid and accurate ultraperformance liquid chromatography with triple-quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry method for compare pharmacokinetics studies of eight active compounds after oral administration between raw and honey-processed farfarae flos extracts. Optimum separation was performed on a Thermo Hypersil GOLD C18 column (100 mm × 2.1 mm, 1.9 µm particles size) with a gradient elution of acetonitrile as mobile phase A and 0.3% formic acid aqueous solution as mobile phase B. The flow rate was set as 0.3 mL/min and separated for 34.0 minutes. Electrospray ionization in the negative ion mode and selected reaction monitoring were used to identify and separate active components. The results met the acceptance criteria and showed that this method exhibited good linear, precision, accuracy, and stability. The extraction recoveries ranged from 81.54% to 104.48%, and the matrix effects ranged from 81.94% to 103.02%. These results show that the validated method could be successfully applied to evaluate the pharmacokinetic study in rats after oral administration of raw farfarae flos (R-FF) and honey-processed farfarae flos (H-FF).