Research Article Development and Validation of Simple RP-HPLC Method for Intracellular Determination of Fluconazole Concentration and Its Application to the Study of

Copyright © 2015 Tigran K. Davtyan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Candida albicans (strains NCTC-885-653 and ATCC-10231) long-term cultivated in the presence of antifungal agent fluconazole (FLC) and classical microbiological methods for determination of minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) were used in this study. A simple and sensitive method based on reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) has been developed for the determination of FLC intracellular concentration inC. albicans using tinidazole as an internal standard. Following extraction with dichloromethane, the chromatographic separation was achieved on a Machery-Nagel EC250/2 Nucleodur-100-3 C18 column by gradient elution using the mobile phase consisting of (A) 0.01M ammonium acetate buffer, pH = 5.00, and (B) acetonitrile. Different analytical performance parameters such as linearity, precision, accuracy, limit of quantification (LOQ), and robustness were determined according to US DHHS FDA and EMEA guidelines. The method was linear for FLC