Abstract
A rapid, selective and sensitive reversed-phase HPLC method for the determination of dipyridamole in human serum was developed, validated, and applied to the pharmacokinetic study of dipyridamole. Dipyridamole and internal standard, loxapine, were extracted from human serum by liquid-liquid extraction with diethyl ether and analyzed on a Nova Pak $C_{I8}$ column with the mobile phase of 40 mM ammonium acetate:methanol:acetonitrile (35:35:30)(v/v/v, pH 7.8). Detection wavelength of 280 nm and flow rate of 1.0 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 dipyridamole concentration (50 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 2-2000 ng/mL with correlation coefficients greater than 0.999. The lower limit of quantification using 0.5 mL of serum was 2 ng/mL, which was sensitive enough for pharmacokinetic studies of dipyridamole. The overall accuracy of the quality control samples ranged from 103.94 to 105.86% for dipyridamole with overall precision (% C.V.) being 4.60-11.49%. The relative mean recovery of dipyridamole for human serum was 97.64%. Stability studies showed that dipyridamole was stable during storage, or during the assay procedure in human serum. The peak area and retention time of dipyridamole 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 dipyridamole in human serum samples for the pharmacokinetic studies of orally administered Dimor tablet (75 mg as dipyridamole) at three different laboratories, demonstrating the suitability of the method.
