Abstract
A rapid, selective and sensitive reversed-phase HPLC method for the determination of glipizide in human serum was validated and applied to the pharmacokinetic study of glipizide. Glipizide and internal standard, tolbutamide, were extracted from human serum by liquid-liquid extraction with benzene and analyzed on a Nova Pak $C_{18}\;60{\AA}$ column with the mobile phase of acetonitrile-potassium dihydrogen phosphate (10 mM, pH 3.5) (4:6, v/v). Detection wavelength of 275 nm and flow rate of 0.7 ml/min were fixed for the study. The assay robustness for the changes of mobile phase pH, organic solvent content, and flow rate was confirmed by $3^3$ factorial design using a fixed glipizide concentration (500 ng/ ml) with respect to its peak area and retention time. And also, the ruggedness of this method was investigated at three different laboratories using same quality control (QC) samples. This method showed linear response over the concentration range of 10-1000 ng/ml with correlation coefficient greater than 0.999. The lower limit of quantitation using 0.5 ml of serum was 10.0 ng/ml, which was sensitive enough for pharmacokinetic studies. The overall accuracy of the quality control samples ranged from 82.6 to 105.0% for glipizide with overall precision (% C.V.) being 1.13-13.20%. The percent recovery for human serum was in the range of 85.2 93.5%. Stability studies showed that glipizide was stable during storage, or during the assay procedure in human serum. The peak area and retention time of glipizide were not significantly affected by the changes of mobile phase pH, organic solvent content, and flow rate under the conditions studied. This method showed good ruggedness (within 15% C.V.) and was successfully used for the analysis of glipizide in human serum samples for the pharmacokinetic studies at three different laboratories, demonstrating the suitability of the method.
