Validated Simultaneous Gradient Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatographic Quantification of Some Proton Pump Inhibitor Drug Residues in Saudi Pharmaceutical Industrial Wastewater

Monitoring and quantification of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) in the environment constitute important and challenging tasks, as they are directly associated with human health. Three commonly used proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), namely, omeprazole sodium (OMP), pantoprazole sodium (PNT), and lansoprazole sodium (LNZ) are well separated and quantified using ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) in pharmaceutical industrial wastewater. The separation of the studied drugs was performed on a stationary phase with a Waters^TM column (100 × 2.1 mm, 1.7 µm). The mobile phase was composed of methanol:0.05 M potassium dihydrogen phosphate buffer (adjusted to pH 7.5 using NaOH) (50:50, v/v). The elution process was done in gradient mode by changing the relative proportions of the mobile phase components with time to get an optimum separation pattern. The flow rate of the developing system was adjusted to 0.8 mL/minute. Detection of the separated drugs was performed at 230 nm. The studied drugs were quantified in the concentration range of 10–200 ng/mL for all drugs. The cited method was fully validated according to the international conference on harmonization (ICH-Q2B) guidelines, then it was applied successfully for quantification of the studied PPIs in real wastewater samples after their solid phase extraction (SPE).