Determination of carbapenem antibiotics using a purpose-made capillary electrophoresis instrument with contactless conductivity detection.

ABSTRACT

In this study, the employment of a purpose-made capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument with capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C4D) as a simple and cost-effective approach for simultaneous determination of different carbapenem antibiotics is reported. The developed CE-C4D approach was for the first time applied for quality control of various pharmaceutical formulations in Vietnam, as well as for therapeutic monitoring of these antibiotics in plasma samples from patients under intensive care. Four of the most popular carbapenems in Vietnam, doripenem, meropenem, imipenem and ertapenem, were determined using an electrolyte composed of 10 mM Tris adjusted to pH 8.0 with acetic acid. The best detection limits achieved using the developed CE-C4D method were 0.36 mg/L and 0.45 mg/L for pharmaceutical and plasma samples, respectively. Good agreement between results from CE-C4D and the confirmation method (HPLC-PDA) was achieved, with a coefficient of determination (r2) for the two pairs of data of 0.9967.