Determination of nifuroxazide in biological fluids by automated high-performance liquid chromatography with large-volume injection.

A high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the measurement of nifuroxazide in plasma is described. The technique is based on the single extraction of the drug from buffered plasma with chloroform, using nifuratel as internal standard. The chromatographic system consisted of a 15 cm x 4.6 mm I.D. stainless-steel column packed with Spherisorb ODS, 5 micrometer, and the mobile phase was acetonitrile-orthophosphoric acid (pH 2.5) (30:70). The method was able to measure accurately plasma nifuroxazide concentrations down to 2 ng . ml-1 using 2 ml of sample with no interference from endogenous compounds. The coefficients of variation of the method at 200 and 2 ng . ml-1 were 3% and 15%, respectively, and the calibration graph was linear in this range. The use of automatic injection makes the method suitable for the routine analysis of large numbers of samples.