Pioneering simultaneous determination of breast cancer medications and metformin through sustainable micellar electrokinetic chromatographic method

The current study is the first report for the capillary electrophoretic simultaneous determination of five breast cancer medications, including febuxostat, quercetin, letrozole and doxorubicin in addition to metformin which is frequently co-administered with these drugs. The studied drugs are frequently purchased in different co-formulations used for breast cancer patients. A green micellar electrokinetic chromatographic (MEKC) method is proposed and optimized assisted by factorial design. The factors optimized include pH and concentration of buffer, surfactant concentration, as well as the applied voltage and injection time. The experimental results prove the optimum separation of the five drugs at pH 9.7 and buffer concentration of 10 mM with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) concentration of 40 mM with +25 kV applied voltage. The developed method is validated considering linearity, precision, accuracy, and robustness adopting official guidelines. Good linearity is observed for all drugs, with correlation coefficients greater than 0.99. The range of percentage recoveries was from 98% to 102% with less than 2% relative standard deviation demonstrating the precision and accuracy of the established method. The study includes in-vitro assay of febuxostat, metformin, and doxorubicin in spiked human plasma. In addition, Accurate determination of the analytes under study in a variety of pharmaceutical dosage forms is accomplished by application of the proposed MEKC method. The greenness profile of the investigated method is confirmed using analytical eco-scale in addition to green analytical procedure index (GAPI) approaches.