Development and validation of a simple liquid chromatographic method with ultraviolet detection for the determination of imatinib in biological samples

The aim of this study was to develop a rapid and sensitive HPLC method with UV detection for the estimation of imatinib from the plasma of patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). The robustness of the method was checked by conducting first dose pharmacokinetics on blood samples from four patients who had been administered Gleevec (100 mg) in an oral dose. Samples were prepared in a simple and single step by precipitating the plasma proteins with methanol and injecting 50 μl aliquot from supernatant was subjected for analysis. Assay was conducted using a C8 column (250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm particle size) under isocratic elution with 0.02 M potassium dihydrogen phosphate–acetonitrile (7:3, v/v) at a flow rate of 1 ml/min and detected using photodiode array at 265 nm. Calibration plots in spiked plasma were linear in a concentration range of 0.05–25 μg/ml. The inter and intra-day variation of standard curve was <4% (R.S.D.). This method could be a simple and quick method for the estimation of imatinib from the patient’s plasma.