Quantitative determination and sampling of azathioprine residues for cleaning validation in production area

Cleaning validation is an integral part of current good manufacturing practices in any pharmaceutical industry. Nowadays, azathioprine and several other pharmacologically potent pharmaceuticals are manufactured in same production area. Carefully designed cleaning validation and its evaluation can ensure that residues of azathioprine will not carry over and cross contaminate the subsequent product. The aim of this study was to validate simple analytical method for verification of residual azathioprine in equipments used in the production area and to confirm efficiency of cleaning procedure. The HPLC method was validated on a LC system using Nova-Pak C18 (3.9 mm × 150 mm, 4 μm) and methanol–water–acetic acid (20:80:1, v/v/v) as mobile phase at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min−1. UV detection was made at 280 nm. The calibration curve was linear over a concentration range from 2.0 to 22.0 μg mL−1 with a correlation coefficient of 0.9998. The detection limit (DL) and quantitation limit (QL) were 0.09 and 0.29 μg mL−1, respectively. The intra-day and inter-day precision expressed as relative standard deviation (R.S.D.) were below 2.0%. The mean recovery of method was 99.19%. The mean extraction-recovery from manufacturing equipments was 83.5%. The developed UV spectrophotometric method could only be used as limit method to qualify or reject cleaning procedure in production area. Nevertheless, the simplicity of spectrophotometric method makes it useful for routine analysis of azathioprine residues on cleaned surface and as an alternative to proposed HPLC method.