Simultaneous high-performance liquid chromatographic determination of pioglitazone and metformin in pharmaceutical-dosage form.

A simple, rapid, and precise method is developed for the quantitative simultaneous determination of metformin and pioglitazone in a combined pharmaceutical-dosage form. Separation is achieved with a Zorbax XDB C(18), 15-cm analytical column using buffer-acetonitrile (66:34, v/v) of pH 7.1, adjusted with orthophosphoric acid as the mobile phase. The buffer used in the mobile phase contains 10mM disodium hydrogen phosphate and 5mM sodium dodecyl sulphate in double-distilled water. The instrumental settings are flow rate of 1 mL/min, column temperature at 40 degrees C, and detector wavelength of 226 nm. The internal standard method is used for the quantitation of the ingredients of this combination. Methylparaben is used as an internal standard. The method is validated and shown to be linear for metformin and pioglitazone. The correlation coefficients for metformin and pioglitazone are 0.9991 and 0.9999, respectively. The relative standard deviations for six replicate measurements in two sets of each drug in the tablets are always less than 2%.