Direct high-performance liquid chromatography enantioseparation of terazosin on an immobilised polysaccharide-based chiral stationary phase under polar organic and reversed-phase conditions.

High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) enantioseparation of terazosin (TER) was accomplished on the immobilised-type Chiralpak IC chiral stationary phase (CSP) under both polar organic and reversed-phase modes. A simple analytical method was validated using a mixture of methanol-water-DEA 95:5:0.1 (v/v/v) as a mobile phase. Under reversed-phase conditions good linearities were obtained over the concentration range 8.76-26.28 microg mL(-1) for both enantiomers. The limits of detection and quantification were 10 and 30 ng mL(-1), respectively. The intra- and inter-day assay precision was less than 1.66% (RSD%). The optimised conditions also allowed to resolve chiral and achiral impurities from the enantiomers of TER. The proposed HPLC method supports pharmacological studies on the biological effects of the both forms of TER and analytical investigations of potential drug formulations based on a single enantiomer. At the semipreparative scale, 5.3 mg of racemic sample were resolved with elution times less than 12 min using a mobile phase consisting of methanol-DEA 100:0.1 (v/v) and both enantiomers were isolated with a purity of > or = 99% enantiomeric excess (ee). The absolute configuration of TER enantiomers was assigned by comparison of the measured specific rotations with those reported in the literature.