Simultaneous determination of metformin, cimetidine, famotidine, and ranitidine in human serum and dosage formulations using HPLC with UV detection.

J Chromatogr Sci 48(9):721-5 (2010) PMID 20875233

A new, simple, and reliable reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic method has been developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of metformin (Metf), cimetidine (Cimt), famotidine (Famt), and ranitidine (Rant) in their synthetic mixtures and tablet formulations. These drugs were separated on a Purospher Star RP18 endcapped (250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d.) column packed with 5-μm particles. The mobile phase, optimized through an experimental design, consisted of methanol-water-triethylamine (20:80:0.05), whose pH was adjusted to 3.0 with phosphoric acid (85%) pumped at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. UV detection was performed at 229 nm. The method was validated in the sample concentration range of 5-25 μg/mL for all the drugs, where it demonstrated good linearity with r = 0.9998, 0.9979, 0.9997, and 0.9987 (n = 6), respectively. For independent 100% level samples, the intra-day and inter-day precision was in the range i.e. < 2.0 for all the drugs. The method demonstrated robustness, resisting to small deliberate changes in pH, flow rate, and composition (organic:aqueous ratio) of the mobile phase. The limit of detection values were 0.071, 0.116, 0.134, and 0.110 μg/mL, while the limit of quantitation were 0.217, 0.352, 0.405, and 0.368 μg/mL for Metf, Cimt, Famt, and Rant, respectively. The applicability of the method was demonstrated by determining the drug content in pharmaceutical formulations, where it exhibited good performance.