Quantitation of artemether in pharmaceutical raw material and injections by high performance liquid chromatography

The quantitation of artemether in both pharmaceutical raw material and injections was carried out by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet detection. A Zorbax C18 column (150 x 4.6 mm; 5 μm), at 30 °C, and a mobile phase composed of acetonitrile and water (70:30), at a flow rate of 1ml/min, were used. The detection wavelength was 216 nm and the injection volume was 20 μL. The method proved to be linear (r2=0.9999), precise (RSD < 20% for intra-day and inter-day precision), accurate and selective regarding possible impurities and excipients of the samples. The detection and quantitation limits were 8 μg/mL and 25 μg/mL, respectively. The artemether content obtained in the raw material analysis was 99.26% and in the injections, 102.08%. The optimized and validated method may be successfully employed to perform routine quality control analyses.