Method Development and Validations For Antimalarial Drugs

Substandard and counterfeit pharmaceutical, especially antimalarials, is a well-recognized and growing public health problem. According to WHO there have been an alarming number of reports of counterfeit antimalarials throughout the world and insufficient regulations and high demand of these very costly pharmaceuticals continues to fuel counterfeiting activity especially in the developing countries. Considering the WHO definition of a counterfeit medicine, in addition, to inadequate resources which mean that there is a scarcity of sophisticated analytical techniques, which hampers the ability to distinguish between genuine and counterfeit drugs. In line with these problems, methods were developed and validated using a reverse phase HPLC method with variable wavelength detector (VWD) for quantification of amodiaquine (AMQ), chloroquine (CQ) and artesunate (ATS) in formulations and spectrophotometric methods using methylene blue and soluble starch as chromogenic agents for Artesunate.