Determination of pitavastatin from human plasma using high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence...

Pitavastatin belongs to the class of coenzyme A reductase inhibitors. Very few methods of assaying pitavastatin from human plasma are available in literature. An analytical method is presented for the determination of the drug from human plasma making use of the fluorescent property of the drug. The drug is extracted from plasma using ethyl acetate under neutral condition and then analyzed by reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with fluorescence detection (lambda(Ex) 245 nm; lambda(Em) 420 nm). Analysis of pitavastatin was carried out on a C18 HPLC column using a gradient flow of mobile phase (0.01 mol/L monobasic potassium phosphate (pH 3.20) -acetonitrile, 63:37, v/v). Fluorescein isothiocyanate was used as internal standard. The dynamic range of assay was 3 to 50 ng/mL. The intraday precision was less than 10% and accuracy ranged from 95.2% to 112.6%. The same for interday check was less than 12% and 92.8% to 105.1%, respectively. The drug was found to be stable under the assay conditions. The developed method is simple, precise, accurate, and stable. This indicates that it can be applied to routine analysis of this drug in human subjects where there are large numbers of samples without the need of specialized instruments like column switching.