Enantiomeric separation and quantitative determination of propranolol enantiomers in pharmaceutical preparations by chiral liquid chromatography

This paper describes validated direct liquid chromatographic chiral methods for enantiomeric separation and quantitative determination of clinically significant ²-blocking agent, propranolol. A liquid chromatographic method was validated and applied for enantiomeric determination of propranolol enantiomers in pharmaceutical formulations. Separation were obtained in polar organic mode on a ±-Burke 2® chiral stationary phase (250 x 4.6 mm, 5µm) with mobile phase composed of dichloromethane:methanol (90:10 v/v), along with 12 mM of ammonium acetate, at a flow rate of 0.9 mL/min. Detection was made by ultraviolet absorption at 280 nm. In all cases the run time was less than 10 min. The correlation coefficient for linear regression curves of R-propranolol and S-propranolol were 0.9995 and 0.9998 respectively. The intra-day precision, expressed as RSD was less than 2%. The accuracy determined by average recovery of R-propranolol and S-propranolol from sample matrices were 97.3% and 100.1% in commercial sample and 99.5% and 100.4% in simulated samples, respectively. Excellent levels of limit of detection (mean value = 1.34 ng) and limit of quantitation (mean value = 4.47 ng), along with rapid elution time of both enantiomers, makes the method useful for routine enantiomeric quality control applications.