'Stability-indicating HPLC methods for drug analysis', by Qyanyun A. Xu and Lawrence A. Trissel. Pp xiv+391. Price £80. Washington DC: American Pharmaceutical Association, and London: Pharmaceutical Press, 1999. ISBN 0 85369 448 6.
This book consists of 250 monographs of drug substances, each of which includes basic physicochemical data but, in particular, provides the user with up to nine (in the case of metronidazole) tried and tested stability indicating high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) analytical methods that have appeared in the literature.
Lawrence Trissel is best known for his 'Handbook on injectable drugs', which has almost biblical status among hospital pharmacists world-wide. This latest compilation is a logical companion volume and will be greatly valued by analysts in quality control laboratories in particular. It will certainly spare the time and tedium of literature searches when presented with an urgent request to assign and validate a shelf-life for a novel preparation involving any of the drugs cited and in a variety of matrices, including injections and oral liquid formulations.
Although the monographs are consistently formatted with name, form, appearance, solubility, pKa (useful) and then the HPLC methods themselves, the methods are written as descriptive text. Personally, I would have preferred to see methods presented in a tabular way, stating column, mobile phase, detector, etc. There are also significant gaps in this compendium: I noted, for example, that there is no entry for methadone, even though an HPLC method is cited in Trissel's 'Handbook'. The authors also acknowledge omissions in the methodology for some entries where such information was not provided in the original papers.
This is the first edition; future editions will inevitably increase the number of drugs, refine the text a little and increase its usefulness. The book is, nevertheless, a very valuable one to have on the shelves for anyone involved in quality control and stability studies.
Reviewer - Robert Shaw
Robert Shaw is director of the East Anglian academic pharmacy practice unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich