Abstract

A rapid, highly sensitive high performance liquid chromatographic method has been developed for the determination of finasteride(FNS) in bulk drug and in tablets. FNS was eluted from a ODS C18 reversed phase column at laboratory temperature (30 ± 2°C) with a mobile phase consisting of methanol and water (80+20) at a flow rate of 1 mL min-1 with UV detection at 225 nm. The retention time was ∼ 6.1 min and each analysis took not more than 10 min. Quantitation was achieved by measurement of peak area without using any internal standard. Calibration graph was linear from 2.0 to 30 μg mL-1 with limits of detection (LOD) and quantification (LOQ) being 0.2 and 0.6 μg mL-1, respectively. The method was validated according to the current ICH guidelines. Within-day co efficients of variation (CV) ranged from 0.31 to 0.69% and between-day CV were in the range 1.2-3.2%. Recovery of FNS from the pharmaceutical dosage forms ranged from 97.89 – 102.9 with CV of 1.41-4.13%. The developed method was compared with the official method for FNS determination in its tablet forms.