A Review on High Performance Liquid Chromatographic Methods for the Determination of Metformin

Background: The presence of pharmaceuticals (PACs) drugs in the environment and their detection and quantification have emerged as one of the challenging issues for the scientific community. Introduction: The gold standard, an anti-diabetic drug, Metformin has a strong potential to contaminate the aquatic bodies, being a highly polar drug. Different analytical methods based on spectroscopic evaluation or chromatographic techniques have been developed to find out the concentration of drug/ their metabolites. Methods: This review article discussed the chromatographic techniques for analysis of Metformin (in ng/L to μg/L) in aqueous samples, pharmaceutical drugs and biological fluids such as urine and human plasma are High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), Reverse-Phase High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (RP-HPLC), High-Performance Thin-layer Chromatography (HPTLC), Hydrophilic Interaction Liquid Chromatography HILIC–MS/MS, Liquid Chromatographic–tandem mass spectrometric (LC-MS-MS), Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography (UPLC). Result: The relevance modifications of traditional HPLC methods for separation of the mixture of drugs with a focus on the lesser time, better resolution, sensitivity, symmetry of peaks, the limit of detection and accuracy of the results has been envisaged through research findings. Hydrophilic interaction liquid chromatography (HILIC) – tandem mass spectrometry method offered the possible solution for highly polar drugs detection and quantification in effluent and surface water samples. Conclusion: HPLC based analytical techniques offer the advantages viz. less time requirement, minimum usage of organic solvents and better separation and quantification of Metformin. The futuristic research approach lies in the development of newer extraction strategies, mobile phases and adsorbent materials for the HPLC based separations.