In vivo pharmacokinetic study of vanillic acid in monocrotaline‐induced pulmonary arterial hypertension rats and its tissue distribution

Abstract Vanillic acid (VA) is a bioactive chemical present in many food plants and fruits. It has been shown to have a protective effect on pulmonary tissues in monocrotaline‐induced pulmonary arterial hypertension, as well as an intervention effect on right ventricular remodeling. The purpose of this study was to develop and test a reliable method for assessing VA utilizing ultra‐performance liquid chromatography–high resolution mass spectrometry using caffeic acid as the internal standard. Across diverse substrates, the correlation coefficient for VA ranged from 0.9992 to 0.9995. The method’s intraday precision was <13.53% (RSD), and its accuracy (RE) ranged from −9.88 to 4.35%. The precision across days was <13.69% (RSD), while the accuracy ranged from 2.16 to 10.94% (RE). The extraction recoveries ranged from 80.30 to 118.81%, with a lower limit of quantification of 20 ng/mL. The approach was successfully applied to pharmacokinetic and tissue distribution studies of VA in rat plasma after gavage administration, and the pharmacokinetic parameters of VA in the plasma of the monocrotaline‐induced pulmonary arterial hypertension were significantly different from those of the control group.