Development of a High-Performance Liquid Chromatographic Method for Determination of Letrozole in Wistar Rat Serum and its Application in Pharmacokinetic Studies

A fast, sensitive, and specific reversed-phase high-performance liquid chroma-tographic (RP–HPLC) method for the determination of letrozole in Wistar rat serum was developed. In this method, liquid–liquid extraction of letrozole was achieved using diethyl ether as the extracting solvent. The analysis was carried out on a reversed-phase C18 (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) column with an isocratic mobile phase of methanol–water (70:30,v/v), at a flow rate of 1.0 mL min^–1. Detection was carried out at 239 nm with a UV–visible spectrophoto-metric detector. The method was shown to be selective and linear over the concentration range of 0.15–100 μg mL^–1. The intra-day and inter-day precision studies showed good reproducibility with coefficients of variation less than 11% for the analyte. The relative errors of intra– and inter–day accuracy were within −11.52 to −2.26%. The limit of quantification was evaluated to be 0.15 μg mL^–1. The method was successfully applied for the pharmacokinetic study of letrozole after oral administration of 10 mg kg^–1 of letrozole in six healthy Wistar rats.