Metabolic profiles of neratinib in rat by using ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with diode array detector and Q-Exactive Orbitrap tandem mass spectrometry

Neratinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of breast cancer. However, its metabolism remains unknown. This study was carried out to investigate the in vitro and in vivo metabolism of neratinib using an UHPLC-DAD-Q Exactive Orbitrap-MS instrument with dd-MS² on-line data acquisition mode. The post-acquisition data was processed using MetWorks software. Under the current conditions, a total of 12 metabolites were detected and structurally identified based on their accurate masses, fragment ions and chromatographic retention times. Among these metabolites, M3, M10 and M12 were unambiguously identified using chemically synthesized reference standards. M6 and M7 (GSH conjugates) were the major metabolites. The metabolic pathways of neratinib were proposed accordingly. Our findings suggested that neratinib was mainly metabolized via O-dealkylation (M3), oxygenation (M8), N-demethylation (M10), N-oxygenation (M12), GSH conjugation (M1, M2, M4, M5, M6 and M7) and N-acetylcysteine conjugation (M9 and M11). The α,β-unsaturated ketone was the major metabolic site and GSH conjugation was the predominant metabolic pathway. In conclusion, this study provided valuable metabolic data and would benefit the assessment of the contributions to the overall activity or toxicity from the key metabolites.