Spectrophotometric Methods as Solutions to Pharmaceutical Analysis of β-Lactam Antibiotics

Abstract

Following the discovery of the first analog of penicillin by A. Fleming (1929), the ┚-lactam antibiotics are still a developing group of chemotherapeutics and are used in treatment of majority of diseases with bacterial etiology. ┚-lactam antibiotics have a broad spectrum of antibacterial activity, favourable pharmacokinetic parameters and low side effects. In ┚lactam therapy two main problems are still current. The increasing resistance of some bacterial strains which implicates necessity to combine the therapy with inhibitors of ┚lactamases and other chemotherapeutics. The second problem of therapy of ┚-lactam antibiotics is their significant instability [1-3]. The analogs from that group are easily degraded in aqueous solutions and in solid state. They are a special group of drugs because parallel to losing the antibacterial efficiency, the strong allergic properties can also appear as a results of their degradation. Therefore in terms of quality control, the stability of ┚-lactam antibiotics in solutions was widely studied. The evaluation of stability concerned also the studies of their metabolites and intravenous solutions after preparations of pharmaceutical dosage forms. Moreover, the evaluation of concentration changes during storage of substance in solid state was also conducted. As problem of the instability of some ┚-lactam analogs has been solved their oral administration is possible. An intake of oral formulations is connected with appearance of excipients, which can influence rate of degradation and cause formation of different degradation products.