Mathematically assisted UV-spectrophotometry as a greener alternative to HPLC-UV for quality control analysis of free-drug combinations

Abstract

Here we introduce a novel and a comprehensive evaluation of the eco-friendliness of UV-spectrophotometry versus HPLC-UV, as used for the quality control testing of free-drug combinations. We offer a new perspective to improve the sustainability of quality control testing of pharmaceuticals, through utilization of UV-spectrophotometry coupled to mathematical signal processing as means to improve selectivity of analysis of multicomponent pharmaceutical samples. First, we developed two novel analytical methods based on UV-spectrophotometry and HPLC-UV, for the simultaneous determination of antidiabetic free-drug combination consisting of dapagliflozin (DAPA) and saxagliptin (SAXA), in the form of active pharmaceutical ingredients or finished pharmaceutical products. Furthermore, we perform qualitative and quantitative evaluation of methods’ greenness employing five reported tools namely: National Environmental Methods Index (NEMI), Raynie and Driver’s assessment tool, Green Analytical Procedure Index (GAPI), Eco-scale and Analytical GREEnness Metric (AGREE). Our results indicate that both methods were equally efficient in quantifying target analytes in the studied forms, however, UV-spectrophotometry was found to be superior to HPLC-UV from a green analytical chemistry perspective, with more than 20 folds reduction in organic solvent consumption, ~ 10 folds reduction in energy consumption and ~4 folds reduction in analysis time, making it a safer alternative to consider.