Quality control of piperaquine in pharmaceutical formulations by capillary zone electrophoresis

Quality control (QC) is of great importance since the pharmaceutical quality not only directly affects the curative effect of the drugs, but also relates to human health and safety closely. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) has recently become a good alternative for pharmaceutical analysis and a complementary technique to high-performance liquid chromatography since it possesses many unique advantages. In this contribution, we propose a simple and reliable capillary zone electrophoretic method for the detection of piperaquine (PQ) in pharmaceutical formulations in terms of quality control, which might be of use to those working on similar compounds. The influence of buffer type, buffer pH, buffer concentration, buffer additive, applied voltage, capillary temperature and injection amount was systemically investigated and the proposed method was then successfully applied to the quality control of piperaquine in its pharmaceutical formulations. With quinine (QN) as an internal standard to improve precision, this method was suitably validated with respect to the linearity, limit of detection and quantification, accuracy, precision, specificity and stability.