In present study, an advanced, simple and a rapid reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method was developed for the quantitative determination of sulfasalazine in rabbit plasma. Sulfasalazine was separated using Chromatopak C-18 basic peerless (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5μ) column in an isocratic mode using mobile phase consisting of the mixture of 10mM Ammonium acetate pH adjusted to 4.5 and acetonitrile (70:30 v/v) with a flow rate of about 1.0 mL/min at ambient temperature. An ultra-violet detection of sulfasalazine and the internal standard was carried out at 362 nm. Both sulfasalazine and internal standard (IS, 4-hydroxy benzoate) were extracted from plasma matrices with high efficiency using a simple protein precipitation method. The method was found to be highly selective with no carryover effects. Linearity of sulfasalazine was found with the range of 2.5-100 μg/mL with the value of r2 > 0.995 a correlation coefficient. At all three quality control levels, developed bioanalytical method was found as repeatable and reproducible as well. The average recoveries of sulfasalazine from plasma were in the range of 95.59-97.16%. The bioanalytical samples showed good and acceptable stability of sulfasalazine solution at different storage, packaging and handling conditions. Hence, in conclusion, the validated and developed HPLC-UV method could be effectively utilized for determination of sulfasalazine in pharmacokinetic studies involving novel formulations.

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