The application of chromatography to the analysis of pharmaceutical creams

Summary The application of GLC, HPLC and TLC to the analysis of pharmaceutical creams is discussed with special attention to sample clean-up. The results of the determination of hydrocortisone acetate, salicylic acid, benzoic acid, diethyl stilbestrol, chloramphenicol, diphenhydramine HCl, tretinoin and some cream base components by reversed phase HPLC are given.Presented at the 14th International Symposium on Chromatography London, September, 1982     

Development and validation of a new Fourier transform infrared spectrometric method for the quantification of urea in creams and ointments

A new Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometric method for the quantification of urea in creams and ointments was developed and validated. The sample was solubilized in a mixture of chloroform/acetonitrile (1/1 v/v) which allows to solubilize the vaseline or other fats as well as urea and water. The solution was examined in a transmission cell with a pathlength of 500 μm provided with NaCl windows. The urea spectrum was obtained by subtraction of the reference solvent mixture spectrum and the reference water spectrum from the sample spectrum. The absorbance of the peak at ±1688 cm⁻¹ was compared to those of calibration standards to quantify urea. The detection limit and the quantification limit (three times and 10 times the noise, respectively) were estimated as 0.4 and 1.3 μg ml⁻¹, respectively. Validation of the method was realized and application of this method to stability tests was done.     

Direct orthogonal signal correction as data pretreatment in the classification of clinical lots of creams from near infrared spectroscopy data

Direct orthogonal signal correction (DOSC) is applied to correct for major variance sources such as temperature effects, time influences and instrumental differences in near infrared (NIR) data. The samples analysed are creams containing different concentrations of an active drug. The final aim is to classify the samples according to their concentration of active compound. Having performed DOSC on the data, it is not necessary anymore to apply sophisticated chemometric techniques to correct for temperature or time effects and to attribute the samples to their respective concentration classes. Moreover, the application of DOSC on the NIR spectra recorded on two different instruments shows that this method can be considered as a valuable alternative for the standardisation in classification applications. Since the applied algorithm tends to overfit, in a second part of this paper, a comparison is made with an algorithm designed by Westerhuis, which should overcome this problem. Although the calibration set results show that the overfitting has been partially corrected for by the latter algorithm, the test set results did not improve significantly.