Development and Validation of a New High-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Ultraviolet Assay for Quantification of Mitoxantrone in Plasma of BALB/c-nu Mice

The concentration of mitoxantrone in the blood of mice was determined by a high-performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet method with aloe-emodin as the internal standard. The separation was performed on a Hypersil BDS2 column (4.6 × 250 mm, 5 μm) as the analytical column, the mobile Phase A was acetonitrile, and B was 20-mM potassium dihydrogen phosphate (adding 1% triethylamine and adjusting the pH to 2.8 with phosphoric acid) and 4.6-mM sodium octyl sulfonate. The flow rate was 1.0 mL·min−1, the detection wavelength was 243 nm, the column temperature is 25 ± 5°C and the injection amount was 20 μL. Finally, the linear range of mitoxantrone was 5–200 μg·mL−1, and the correlation coefficient was r = 0.9999. The recovery rate of the method was 91.93–105.5%, and the extraction recovery rate was 91.45–105.5%. The intraday precision and interday precision were <3.29% (limit of detection = 0.3 μg·mL−1). The HPLC method established in this paper was simple, rapid, sensitive and accurate, and can be used to determine the content of mitoxantrone in mouse plasma after tail vein injection.