Measurement of ribavirin and evaluation of its stability in human plasma by high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection

A simple high-performance liquid chromatography method for the determination of the antiviral agent ribavirin in human plasma was developed and validated. The method involved solid-phase extraction on phenyl boronic acid cartridges, a reversed-phase liquid chromatography with a Waters Atlantis dC18 (150 mm x 3.9 mm, 5 microm) column and a mobile phase consisting of 10 mM potassium phosphate buffer (pH 4.0), and ultraviolet detection at 207 nm. This assay proved to be sensitive (lower limit of quantification of 0.05 microg/ml), linear (correlation coefficients >or=0.997), specific (no interference with various potentially co-administrated drugs), reproducible (both intra-day and inter-day coefficients of variation