Spectrophotometric Study for the Reaction of Pentoxifylline Hydrochloride with 1,2-Naphthoquinone-4-Sulphonate: Kinetics, Mechanism and Application for Development of High-Throughput Kinetic Microwell Assay for Pentoxifylline in Quality Control Laboratory

Abstract

Spectrophotometric study was carried out, for the first time, to investigate the reaction between the vasodilator pentoxifylline hydrochloride (POX) and 1,2-naphthoquinone-4-sulphonate (NQS) reagent. The reaction occurs in alkaline medium to activate the nucleophilic substitution reaction producing an orange-colored product measured spectrophometrically at λ max 472 nm. The variables affecting the reaction were carefully studied and the conditions were optimized. The kinetics of the reaction was investigated and its activation energy was found to be 0.262 cal/mol. Owing to its low activation energy, the reaction proceeded easily and was successfully used for simple and rapid assay of POX. The stoichiometry of the reaction was determined (1:1), and the reaction mechanism was suggested. To develop a high-throughput methodology used in quality control laboratory, a comparative study of the reaction using the conventional spectrophotometric versus microwell assay was applied. Under the optimum reaction conditions, the initial rate and fixed time methods were utilized for constructing the calibration graphs for determination of POX concentrations. The linear range was 10 - 120 μg/ml with good correlation coefficients (0.9987 - 0.9998). The LOD was 2.5 and 3.4 μg/ml for initial rate and fixed time methods, respectively. The intra- and inter-day accuracy and precision of the developed methods were satisfactory, where RSD was ≤3.94%. The present methods have been successfully applied to the determination of POX in its pharmaceutical tablets, and the percentage recovery values were 97.9% - 101.9%. Therefore, we strongly recommend the proposed methods for determination of POX in quality control laboratories.