Mending the fluorescence of two α-blockers through a semiquinoid formation: Hyphenated with experimental design...

Herein, a selective and rapid spectrofluorimetric method coupled with experimental design approach for reliable and efficient determination of two α-blockers, namely: terazosin hydrochloride (TER) and doxazosin mesylate (DOX) in their marketed tablets was developed. The presented method adopts formation of a semi-quinoid form of the studied drugs in borate buffer. The effects of parameters influencing fluorescence intensity including pH, the volume of buffer and diluting solvent were optimized using an experimental design methodology. The optimum conditions were found to be pH: 9.8, the volume of buffer: 2.0 mL and diluting solvent: water. Under the optimum experimental conditions, a large enhancement of the studied drugs fluorescence was obtained, measured at 387 after excitation at 246 nm for either TER or DOX with limits of detection 0.05 and 0.14 ng mL^-1 and limits of quantification 0.14 and 0.43 ng mL^-1 in the concentration ranges of 0.2-30.0 ng mL^-1 and 0.5-30.0 ng mL^-1 for TER and DOX, respectively. The presented method was validated according to the ICH guidelines. Furthermore, it extended to perform the content uniformity testing and analysis of the studied drugs in spiked human plasma with % recovery (96.00 ± 0.45-101.42 ± 1.20%, n = 3).