Comparison of microbiological and UV-spectrophotometric assays for determination of voriconazole in tablets.

Two methods have been developed for the determination of voriconazole, a new antifungal drug, in tablets. A UV method, with detection at 255 nm, was compared with a diffusion agar bioassay, which used Sacharomyces cerevisiae ATCC 2601 as the assay organism. The developed methods were linear in the range of 3.0-12.0 and 12.0-24.0 microg/mL, for the microbiological and UV methods, respectively, both exhibiting a coefficient correlation of 0.9999. The UV method demonstrated an improved precision compared to the bioassay method (1.0 versus 2.4%). The average recovery, 99.8 and 100.9%, was suitable in both methods. The results obtained by these 2 methods were compared with those of a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method published previously, and no evidence of significant difference was observed. The proposed methods are appropriate for the determination of voriconazole in tablets and can be used in routine quality control.