Mercaptopurine (MP) and dimercaprol (DMC) are mercaptons which are used to treat cancer and acute poisoning like arsenic, mercury, gold and lead respectively. The quality and quantity of these drugs in the marketed pharmaceutical formulations need to be ensured to reduce toxicity and to achieve a better therapeutic effect. The excessive exploitation of these drugs may exert harmful effects on human health. On the other hand, expiry date chemicals after thrown in water bodies are dangerous for environment. The quick determination of these drugs in pharmaceutical formulations, biological fluids and water samples is of great importance. Hence, simple and sensitive spectrophotometric method was developed for their determination. The reactions of compounds with carbon disulphide and copper(I) perchlorate were carried out in the presence of sodiumbicarbonate to form a yellow coloured copper(I) drug dithiocarbamate complex and it was investigated for the spectrophotometric determination of these drugs. The analysis was accomplished by measuring the intensity of yellow colour at 370 and 455nm respectively for mercaptopurine and DMC against a reagent blank. Under the optimized conditions, calibration graphs were linear in the ranges of 3.04-60.86 and 1.24-18.63 μg/mL with the detection limit (3.3 σ / s) of 0.7480 and 0.3227 μg/mL respectively. The high recoveries of the mercaptopurine and dimercaaprol drugs by the proposed method from respective pharmaceutical formulations (98.0-99.8 and 98.3-99.6), simulated biological fluids (87.0-95.2 and 87.5-94.5 %) and spiked water samples (88.3-95.5 and 87.5-95.1 %) indicate good accuracy and precision of the method.
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