A NEW STABILITY-INDICATING RP-HPLC METHOD FOR DETERMINATION OF CURCUMIN: AN APPLICATION TO NANOPARTICULATE FORMULATION Original Article SUCHITRA PANIGRAHI 1 , RAJASHREE HIRLEKAR *2 1,2 Received: 03 Aug 2016 Revised and Accepted: 14 0ct 2016 Department of Quality Assurance, Vivekanand Education Society’s College of Pharmacy, Hashu Advani Memorial Complex, Behind Collector Colony, Chembur(E), Mumbai 400074. Maharashtra, India Email: rajashree.hirlekar@ves.ac.in ABSTRACT Objective: The present study was aimed to develop a rapid, accurate, linear, sensitive and stability-indicating high performance liquid chromatographic method for determination of curcumin and to implement the developed method for the estimation of curcumin in the nanoparticulate formulation. Methods: Method development was performed using various solvent, buffer-solvent ratios, at different flow rates for better resolution and to decrease the run time. The developed method was validated in accordance with the international conference on harmonization (ICH) guidelines. The developed method was implemented to estimate the amount of curcumin in the curcumin-nanoparticulate formulation. Results: The optimum chromatographic conditions with adequate resolution for curcumin (16.10 min) was achieved when the separation was carried using C18 Conclusion: The developed analytical method is simple, precise, and reproducible and thus can be used for stability-indicating analysis of curcumin in pharmaceutical formulations. column at ambient temperature with an isocratic elution mode of mobile phase composed of a degassed mixture of phosphate buffer pH 3 and acetonitrile (50:50 v/v) at 1.0 ml/min flow rate with a total run time of 20 min. The developed method was validated for system suitability, accuracy, precision, limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ), linearity and range. The LOD and LOQ were found to be 0.018 and 0.056 μg/ml respectively, which indicates that the method was sensitive, and can detect and quantify at lower levels of curcumin. Linearity range was from 5-15 μg/ml for curcumin with regression coefficient 0.997 indicates that at this concentration range curcumin was highly linear. Percent assay of curcumin was found to be 98.7% and curcumin recovered was found to be 0.78 mg which are estimated by using the developed method. Keywords: Analytical method development, Curcumin, Nanoparticles, RP-HPLC-PDA, Stability-indicating © 2016 The Authors. Published by Innovare Academic Sciences Pvt Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22159/ijpps.2016v8i12.14473 INTRODUCTION Curcumin is a hydrophobic polyphenolic substance isolated from the rhizomes of Curcuma longa Linn. Family (Zingiberaceae) along with other two de-methoxy compounds which are desmethoxycurcumin and bisdemethoxycurcumin. Structurally, curcumin is 1,7-bis (4- hydroxy-3-methoxyphenyl)-1,6-heptadiene-3,5-dione (fig. 1). Mostly, it is available in the market as a mixture of three different constituents, commonly known as curcuminoids [1, 2, 3]. It is a coloring principle in turmeric and has been found to have a wide range of pharmacological activities and exhibits significant therapeutic potential in the treatment of wound healing [4], cancer [5], arthritis, atherosclerosis, diabetes mellitus, fever, gastric ulcer, inflammatory bowel disease, lung diseases, malaria, multiple sclerosis, myocardial infarction, osteoporosis, pancreatitis, psoriasis [6]. Safety of curcumin at very high doses has been proved in various animal and human studies. These studies led to the approval of curcumin as a ‘Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS)’ ingredient by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States of America, by the Natural health products directorate of Canada and the Expert Joint Committee of the Food and Agriculture Organization/ World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) on food additives (JECFA) [7]. O O OCH 3 OH H 3 CO O H Fig. 1: Chemical structure of curcumin A survey of the literature showed that various analytical techniques are available for determination of curcumin from bulk drug and pharmaceutical dosage forms. A high-performance thin layer chromatography ( Different HPLC methods have been reported for the analysis of curcumin, such as HPLC methods with fluorescence detector have been used for its quantification in biological samples [10]. HPLC-UV methods were also used for the quantitative determination of curcumin in biological samples [11]. HPLC-PDA methods were also reported for determination of curcumin [12] and simultaneous estimation of piperine and curcumin in nanoparticulate formulation [13]. A stability-indicating HPLC method for quantitative determination of curcumin in laboratory samples [14] and simultaneous estimation of silymarin and curcumin also have been reported [1]. Several other methods such as fluorimetric methods [15] and NMR methods [16] have been used for the determination and rapid quantitation of curcumin. HPTLC) method has been used for the determination of curcumin in bulk drug and pharmaceutical formulations [8]. Also, capillary electrophoresis methods have been reported for determination and detection of curcumin [9]. The reported methods were not cost effective due to the use of highly sophisticated detectors, costly solvents such as tetrahydrofuran and some methods were found to be less sensitive. So in the present work a simple, precise, sensitive and stability-indicating method was developed by using low-cost solvent acetonitrile with buffer in ratio 50:50, detected by using photodiode array detector which was highly sensitive to detect at a lower concentration. The developed method was used for estimation of curcumin from curcumin nanoparticles in which mobile phase was used for extraction of curcumin. The use of mobile phase as an extracting solvent makes it more compatible with the developed method. International Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences ISSN- 0975-1491 Vol 8, Issue 12, 2016