Quantification of intracellular and extracellular digoxin and ouabain by liquid chromatography/electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry

A liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry method for the determination of intracellular accumulation in addition to transcellular transport of digoxin and ouabain in renal epithelial HK-2 cells was developed. The solid-phase extraction Bond Elut^® C18 (100mg/1mL) cartridge was used for the extraction of digoxin and ouabain from extracellular (medium) and intracellular (cell lysate) matrices. Chromatographic separation was performed on a CAPCELL PAK C18 MGII column (2.0mm×150mm, 5μm). This method covered a linear range of 0.5-1000ng/mL of concentrations in medium and 0.5-1000ng of concentrations in cell lysate for digoxin and ouabain. The intra-day precision and inter-day precision of analysis were less than 11.9%, and the accuracy was within ±11.6%. The total run time was 16min. Our method was successfully applied to the transport experiments of digoxin and ouabain by HK-2 cell monolayers.