Use of Vancomycin as Chiral Selector in Capillary Electrophoresis. Optimization and Quantitation of Loxiglumide Enantiomers in Pharmaceuticals

Vancomycin has been used as chiral selector for the enantiomers separation of D,L-loxiglumide, a new drug proposed for the treatment of gastrointestinal pathology. The chiral selector, dissolved at very low concentration in the running buffer, filled only part of the capillary (polyacrylamide coated) and allowed chiral resolution in less than 12 min using a 50 mM phosphate buffer at pH 6. The partial separation technique allowed to obtain a detection limit of 0.5 ?g/ml for each enantiomer avoiding the drop in sensitivity due to the strong UV absorption of vancomycin when present in the detector path. The effects of vancomycin concentration and buffer pH on enantiomers resolution have been studied in order to find the optimum experimental conditions for the chiral purity control of drug. The optimized method, using the internal standard, showed good reproducibility for both migration times and normalized peak area ratio and for linearity. Under the studied operating conditions it was possible to detect 0.2 % (w/w) of L-loxiglumide as a chiral impurity. Analysis of pharmaceutical preparations of D-loxiglumide did not reveal the presence of the impurity (L-isomer).