Quantification of drugs encapsulated in liposomes by ¹H NMR

Liposomes are one of the most important and extensively studied drug delivery system due to their ability to encapsulate different kinds of drugs. Exploiting the advantages of ¹H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometry, we established a rapid and easy method for quantification of drugs encapsulated in liposomes. An internal standard, pyridine, was used for quantitative determination of drug concentration. Two different drugs were involved in this work, one hydrophilic, methotrexate disodium salt, and another hydrophobic, tamoxifen. The specificity and selectivity of the suggested method were evaluated by the absence of overlapping of at least one signal of each drug with pyridine in the NMR spectrum. The accuracy and precision of the method were assessed by adding a known amount of each drug to unloaded liposomes. Results obtained by quantitative NMR (qNMR) were validated and confirmed by comparing with two other traditional techniques, Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-vis) spectrophotometry and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). It was found that the results were consistent with the ones obtained from our proposed qNMR method. Considering all the experiments conducted in this study, we deliberate that qNMR can be a suitable tool for the determination of drugs encapsulated in liposomes.