The present study reports the development and validation of a simple, economic and sensitive HPLC method for the concurrent determination of naproxen and esomeprazole in pharmaceutical formulations. Isocratic chromatography was performed with C-18 column and mixture of phosphate buffer (pH 6.1) and acetonitrile in ratio of (40:60, v/v) at 1.5 mlmin -1. The eluents were monitored at 302 nm using UV detector. The method was isocratic in the range of 9.38 to 300 µgml -1 for naproxen and 0.5 to 16 µgml -1 for esomeprazole. Validation of the method was performed by testing parameters like linearity, accuracy, precision, robustness, specificity, LOD and LOQ values. In the specificity the drugs were subjected to forced degradation studies like acidic, basic, oxidative and thermal stresses. Both the analytes were separated within three minutes. As the method separates the degradation products produced during forced degradation studies from the active analytes so it can be used not only for regular determination of naproxen and esomeprazole but also for their stability studies.Key words: HPLC, acetonitrile, isocratic, specificity, forced degradation study.e-mail: ashfaqchemist@hotmail.com
1-INTRODUCTIONNaproxen (Fig.1) chemically designated as [(S)-6-methoxy-alpha-methyl-2-naphthaleneacetic acid] is non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medicine that demonstrates both antipyretic and analgesic behavior [1][2][3][4]. It can be used for the remedy of various diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, osteoarthritis, primary dysmenorrheal and acute gout [5]. After taken orally, naproxen is partially metabolized to its 6-O-desmethylated active metabolite. Both the drug and its metabolite are then excreted through urine either as unchanged or in conjugation with sulphate or glucoronic acid [6][7][8].A careful literature survey did not reveal any single analytical technique for the determination of naproxen and esomeprazole simultaneously. Therefore, attempts were made to develop and validate an isocratic reverse phase HPLC method to determine both drugs simultaneously. We are currently engaged in binary combination analysis of different classes of drugs in synthetic mixtures and in pharmaceutical formulations [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. The present work is therefore, aimed to attain the optimum chromatographic conditions for the determination of naproxen and esomeprazole simultaneously.We describe in this paper a simple, cheap, sensitive and validated HPLC method with run time less than 3 minutes for the determination of naproxen and esomeprazole simultaneously in pharmaceutical formulations. The developed method can be applied to routine quality control analysis of drugs and for other analytical purposes.
2-EXPERIMENTAL
Chemicals and ReagentsReference standards of both naproxen and esomeprazole with claimed percentage purity of 99.62 and 99.71 % respectively were kindly gifted by Schazoo Zaka Laboratories (Lahore, Pakistan). Acetonitrile (chromatography grad...