Development and implication of a capillary electrophoresis methodology for ciprofloxacin, paracetamol and diclofenac sodium in pharmaceutical formulations and simultaneously in human urine samples

This work studies the development of a simple and fairly rapid methodology for simultaneous determination/ separation of three frequently co-administered drugs; ciprofloxacin [CIP], paracetamol [PCT] and diclofenac sodium [DIG] using capillary electrophoresis [CE] with UV detection at 260 nm. Separation was achieved in only 6.5 min with a simple buffer of sodium tetraborate [50 mM] at pH 9.0. The Parameters affecting the separation and detection were optimized. The calibration curves were linear in the range of 5-500 microg/mL for CIP, 5-250 micro g/mL for PCT and 1-125 microg/mL for DIC sodium under the optimized conditions. The lower limit of detection [LOD] was found to be 1 microg/mL for CIP and PCT and 0.5 microg/mL for DIC. The method was successfully used for the analysis of drugs in commercial pharmaceutical formulations and simultaneously from patient's urine sample with RSD 0.5-2.4%. Results obtained with CE method are compared with standard HPLC procedure and were found in good agreement