Multicomponent spectrometric analysis of drugs and their preparations

Pharmaceutical preparations may contain a single ingredient or multi-ingredients as well as excipients. In multicomponent systems, specific analytical methods are required to determine the concentrations of individual components in the presence of interfering substances. Ultraviolet and visible spectrometric methods have widely been developed for the analysis of drugs in mixtures and pharmaceutical preparations. These methods are based on ultraviolet and visible multicomponent analysis and chemometrics (multivariate data analysis). The commonly used chemometric methods include principal component analysis (PCA); regression involving classical least squares (CLS), partial least squares (PLS), inverse least squares (ILS), principal component regression (PCR), multiple linear regression (MLR), artificial neural networks (ANNs); soft independent modeling of class anthology (SIMCA), PLS-discriminant analysis (DA); and functional data analysis (FDA). In this chapter, the applications of multicomponent ultraviolet and visible, derivative, infrared and mass spectrometric and spectrofluorimetric methods to the analysis of multi-ingredient pharmaceutical preparations, biological samples and the kinetics of drug degradation have been reviewed. Chemometric methods provide an efficient solution to calibration problems in the analysis of spectral data for the simultaneous determination of drugs in multicomponent systems. These methods facilitate the assessment of product quality and enhance the efficiency of quality control systems.

Development of a Stability Indicating Method for Simultaneous Analysis of Five Water-Soluble Vitamins by Liquid Chromatography

Background

Water-soluble vitamins are often included simultaneously in pharmaceutical formulations as food complements or in parenteral nutrition mixtures. Given their sensitivity to heat, light or pH variations, it is important to study their stability using validated stability indicating methods. We thus aimed to validate a liquid chromatography (LC) stability-indicating method for the simultaneous quantification of 5 water-soluble vitamins.

Methods

We analyzed four water-soluble B vitamins (nicotinamide, pyridoxine, folic acid, cyanocobalamin) and ascorbic acid using a LC method with diode array detector. They were separated on a C18 stationary phase under gradient elution of solvent A [0.2 % of metaphosphoric acid in water and acetonitrile 98:2] and solvent B (100 % acetonitrile). All vitamins were subjected to forced degradation conditions and we showed that the obtained degradation products didn’t interfere with the vitamins.

Results

The method allows the separation of the 5 water-soluble vitamins in a 30 minute run without any interference from the breakdown products obtained with acid/alkaline solutions, hydrogen peroxide, temperature and light. It meets all the qualitative and quantitative criteria for validation with an acceptable accuracy and good linearity.

Conclusions

This stability-indicating method can be used for carrying out stability studies of water-soluble vitamins in pharmaceutical preparations.

Normal and reverse flow injection-spectrophotometric determination of thiamine hydrochloride in pharmaceutical preparations using diazotized metoclopramide

Simple and sensitive normal and reverse flow injection methods for spectrophotometric determination of thiamine hydrochloride (THC) at the microgram level were proposed and optimized. Both methods are based on the reaction between THC and diazotized metoclopramide in alkaline medium. Beer's law was obeyed over the range of 10-300 and 2-90 μg/mL, the limits of detection were 2.118 and 0.839 μg/mL and the sampling rates were 80 and 95 injections per hour for normal and reverse flow injection methods respectively. The application of both methods to commercially available pharmaceuticals produced acceptable results. The flow system is suitable for application in quality control processes.