A new high-performance liquid chromatographic method for determination of warfarin enantiomers

Warfarin is the most common agent used for control and prevention of venous as well as arterial thromboembolism. Although warfarin is administered as a racemic mixture of two stereoisomers (S and R), the S-form is mainly responsible for the anticoagulant effect. The anticoagulant effect of the drug is monitored by analysis of prothrombin complex (International Normalised Ratio,INR). In some cases, however, the measurements of plasma warfarin concentration are needed. Here, we present a new, rapid, sensitive and cost-effective HPLC-method for the determination of warfarin enantiomers in plasma. The chromatographic system consisted of Waters 616 gradient pump, Waters 996 photo diode array detector, Gilson 230 autoinjector and Pirkle (R,R) Whelk-O1 column (25 cm × 4.6 mm I.D., 5 μm). An isocratic mobile phase of methanol/acetonitrile/water (50/10/40, v/v) with 0.1% glacial acetic acid was used. The follow rate was 1 mL/min. Data analysis was carried out with Waters Millennium32. The absorbance at 305 nm was measured with a total run-time of 15 min. Method linearity was studied by establishing regression data containing eight points over the range 0.08-10 μg/mL. In this range, warfarin showed to be linear (r2 = 0.9997 for S-warfarin and r2 = 0.9998 for R-warfarin). The limit of detection in plasma was 16 ng/mL for S-warfarin and 18 ng/mL for R-warfarin. Limit of quatitation was defined as 10 × LOD. The extraction recovery was approximately 80%. Also the relation between INR and warfarin concentration was investigated. As expected, there was a low correlation between these two variables (r = 0.23, y = 0.3044x + 0.9712). This method offers a rapid and cost-effective determination of warfarin enantiomers in human plasma.