Amponsaa-Karikari Abena, Kishikawa Naoya, Ohba Yoshihito, Nakashima Kenichiro, Kuroda Naotaka
Course of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Nagasaki University, 1-14 Bunkyo-Machi, Nagasaki 852-8521, Japan.
Biomed Chromatogr. 2006 Nov;20(11):1157-62. doi: 10.1002/bmc.664.
Artemisinin is an antimalarial drug containing an internal endoperoxide linkage in its structure. A simple, selective and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-peroxyoxalate chemiluminescence (PO-CL) method for the determination of artemisinin was developed. This method is based on the fact that endoperoxide in artemisinin structure can be converted to hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) under ultraviolet (UV) irradiation and the generated hydrogen peroxide can be measured using PO-CL detection. The HPLC-PO-CL system was optimized on a mobile phase, post column chemiluminescence reagent, UV source and irradiation time. In addition, the system was combined with simple liquid-liquid extraction using n-hexane that allowed selective and sensitive determination of artemisinin in serum. The limit of detection using 0.5 mL of blood was 0.062 micromol/L (17.5 ng/mL) at a signal-to-noise ratio of 3. Calibration curve obtained for artemisinin in human serum 4-80 micromol/L (1.1-22.6 microg/mL) showed a good linearity (r = 0.999).
