Simultaneous determination of eight phenolic acids, five saponins and four tanshinones for quality control of compound preparations containing Danshen-Sanqi herb-pair by HPLC-DAD

Background: The herb-pair, Salviaemiltiorrhizae (Danshen, DS) and Panaxnotoginseng (Sanqi,SQ), often occurs in traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions used for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases in clinics in Asian areas. Many commercial preparations containing the DS-SQ herb-pair were produced by various manufactures with the different production process. The raw materials were from different sources, which raised a challenge to control the quality of the herb-pair medicines. Objective: In this paper, a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was developed to simultaneously determine seventeen bioactive components, including 8 phenolic acids, 4 tanshinones, and 5 saponins, for quality control of compound preparations containing DS-SQ herb-pair. The chromatographic separation was studied on an Ultimate^TM XB-C₁₈ column (150 mm × 4.6 mmi.d., 3.5 μm) with a mobile phase composed of 0.5% aqueous acetic acid and acetonitrile using a gradient elution in 70 min. Results: The optimum detection wavelength was set at 288 nm for phenolic acids and tanshinones, and 203 nm for saponins. The method was validated sufficiently by examining the precision, recoveries, linearity, range, LOD and LOQ, and was successfully applied to quantify the seventeen compounds in five commercial preparations containing DS-SQ herb-pair. Conclusions: It is the first time to report the rapid and simultaneous analysis of the seventeen compounds with the base-line separation of peaks for ginsenoside Rg₁ and Re in 70 min by routine HPLC. This HPLC method could be considered as good quality criteria to control the quality of preparations containing DS-SQ herb-pair.