Rapid high-performance liquid chromatography method for determination of pregabalin in a pharmaceutical dosage form following derivatization with fluorescamine

A simple, fast, and sensitive HPLC method was developed and validated for the evaluation of pregabalin in a pharmaceutical dosage form using fluorescamine as a derivatization agent for the first time. After a precolumn derivatization (5 min, room temperature), the reaction mixture was chromatographed on a C18 column with isocratic elution using 0.2% of triethylamine in a mixture of methanol and water (10 + 90, v/v). 3-Aminopentanoic acid was used as the internal standard. Using fluorescent detection (lamdaex 395 nm, lamdaem 476 nm), a low detection limit of 0.02 microg/mL was reached. The method was linear (r > 0.999) over the lower (0.125-25 microg/mL) and higher (1.25-250 microg/mL) concentration range. The intraday and interday precision of the QC samples was < 4.3%, and the accuracy was 94.2-102.5%. The samples were stable for 24 h at 4 degrees C. The robustness study showed that the derivatization is more robust than the chromatography method. The method was applied for the analysis of pregabalin content in 25, 75, and 300 mg capsules, and a good agreement was found with the declared amount of pregabalin (the relative error did not exceed 3.2%). Finally, the method was successfully used for dissolution studies of pregabalin capsules.