Green Spectrophotometric Determination of Two Cephalosporin Drugs Used in COVID-19 Regimen Through Silver Nanoparticle Synthesis.

BACKGROUND: Cefixime trihydrate (CFX) and cefuroxime axetil (CFU) are antibacterial drugs. They are widely used in the treatment of bacterial infection and recently in COVID-19 treatment. OBJECTIVE: In this article, the two antibacterial drugs, CFX and CFU, were determined by a new simple, sensitive, effective, and green spectrophotometric method via reaction with silver nitrate (AgNO3). METHODS: The reaction was based on reduction of AgNO3 by the cited drugs to silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) in the presence of polyvinylpyrrolidine (PVP) as stabilizing agent. Very intense surface plasmon resonance peaks were obtained at 435 nm for CFX and CFU that allow quantitative determination of the drugs. RESULTS: The calibration curves were linear with concentration ranges of 0.2-1.4 µg/mL and 0.3-2.1 µg/mL for CFX and CFU, respectively. Validation of the proposed method has been done according to ICH (International Conference of Harmonization) guidelines; the method was verified on the Green Analytical Procedure Index and Analytical Greenness metric approach (AGREE) in regard to its greenness and was found to be an excellent green alternative method. CONCLUSION: A very sensitive and green spectrophotometric method was developed for determination of CFX and CFU in pure and dosage form. HIGHLIGHT: The developed method not previously reported for simultaneous determination of CFX and CFU.

A green spectrophotometric method for the simultaneous determination of nasal binary mixture used in respiratory diseases: Applying isosbestic point and chemometric approaches as a resolving tool, greenness evaluation.

Nasal drug combination is a very useful therapy for elevating the symptoms of various respiratory diseases as seasonal allergic rhinitis and infectious respiratory illness as pandemic COVID-19. One of best combination is Fluticasone propionate (FLU) and Azelastine (AZE). In this study, different UV spectrophotometric and chemometric methods have been applied for quantitative analysis of FLU and AZE without previous separation in their pure form, laboratory prepared mixture and pharmaceutical dosage form. Absorbance subtraction (AS) and Amplitude modulation (AM) spectrophotometric methods have been applied for the simultaneous determination of the cited drugs. Besides, three well-known chemometric techniques; namely, classical least squares (CLS), partial least square (PLS), and principal component regression (PCR) have been applied for the simultaneous analysis of both drugs by using spectrophotometric data. To be friendly to the environment, the greenness of the proposed methods was taken into consideration and evaluation of the analytical methods' greenness was done using two green analytical chemistry metrics known as, Analytical Greenness Calculator and an eco-scale scoring method. They indicated that the methods were environmentally friendly in relation to numerous approaches like instrument, reagents, and safety of waste. Analyzing laboratory prepared mixtures including different quantities of FLU and AZE, as well as their marketed dose form, was used to assess the selectivity of the applied methods. The validity of the developed methods was investigated by applying the standard addition technique. The resulting data were statistically compared to those obtained by the official or reported HPLC methods for FLU and AZE, which revealed no significant difference in accuracy and precision at p = 0.05.