Development and implication of a capillary electrophoresis methodology for ciprofloxacin, paracetamol and diclofenac sodium in pharmaceutical formulations and simultaneously in human urine samples.

This work studies the development of a simple and fairly rapid methodology for simultaneous determination/separation of three frequently co-administered drugs; ciprofloxacin (CIP), paracetamol (PCT) and diclofenac sodium (DIC) using capillary electrophoresis (CE) with UV detection at 260 nm. Separation was achieved in only 6.5 min with a simple buffer of sodium tetraborate (50 mM) at pH 9.0. The Parameters affecting the separation and detection were optimized. The calibration curves were linear in the range of 5-500 µg/mL for CIP, 5-250 µg/mL for PCT and 1-125 µg/mL for DIC sodium under the optimized conditions. The lower limit of detection (LOD) was found to be 1 µg/mL for CIP & PCT and 0.5 µg/mL for DIC. The method was successfully used for the analysis of drugs in commercial pharmaceutical formulations and simultaneously from patient's urine sample with RSD 0.5-2.4%. Results obtained with CE method are compared with standard HPLC procedure and were found in good agreement.