Determination of doripenem and related substances in medicinal product using capillary electrophoresis

Abstract

Doripenem, the latest carbapenem antibiotic licensed in the United States (15 October 2007) and the European Union (25 July 2008), has been implemented into therapeutic use along with imipenem, meropenem and ertapenem. The described method of zone electrophoresis in a low pH buffer for the separation of doripenem from its impurities has been successfully performed using field-amplified sample stacking (FASS), followed by UV absorption detection at 214 nm. The best results were obtained with phosphate buffer (100 mM) pH 2.9 containing 10% (v/v) of methanol, as the background electrolyte. Uncoated fused-silica capillary (60/52 cm; 75 μm id) with normal polarity, and voltage values of 25 kV, was used throughout the investigation. The optimised method of doripenem determination was validated in terms of linearity, accuracy and precision, and provides a detection limit of 3.0 μg/mL of doripenem. The repeatability, expressed by relative standard deviation (RSD) of the migration time, for doripenem and its degradation products varied from 1.37 to 2.51%, whereas the corrected peak areas were about 0.91-9.87%. Satisfactory separation was achieved within 20 min of electrophoresis; moreover, all carbapenems (imipenem, meropenem, ertapenem and doripenem) were well separated from each other during this time. The evaluated CZE method was applied in the analysis of a medicinal product containing doripenem Doribax(®) powder for solution for infusion.