Diffuse reflectance near infrared-chemometric methods development and validation of amoxicillin capsule formulations

The aim of present study was to establish near infrared-chemometric methods that could be effectively used for quality profiling through identification and quantification of amoxicillin (AMOX) in formulated capsule which were similar to commercial products. In order to evaluate a large number of market products easily and quickly, these methods were modeled.

Thermo Scientific Antaris II near infrared analyzer with TQ Analyst Chemometric Software were used for the development and validation of the identification and quantification models. Several AMOX formulations were composed with four excipients microcrystalline cellulose, magnesium stearate, croscarmellose sodium and colloidal silicon dioxide. Development includes quadratic mixture formulation design, near infrared spectrum acquisition, spectral pretreatment and outlier detection. According to prescribed guidelines by International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) and European Medicine Agency (EMA) developed methods were validated in terms of specificity, accuracy, precision, linearity, and robustness.

On diffuse reflectance mode, an identification model based on discriminant analysis was successfully processed with 76 formulations; and same samples were also used for quantitative analysis using partial least square algorithm with four latent variables and 0.9937 correlation of coefficient followed by 2.17% root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC), 2.38% root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP), 2.43% root mean square error of cross-validation (RMSECV).

Proposed model established a good relationship between the spectral information and AMOX identity as well as content. Resulted values show the performance of the proposed models which offers alternate choice for AMOX capsule evaluation, relative to that of well-established high-performance liquid chromatography method. Ultimately three commercial products were successfully evaluated using developed methods.