Low-cost and versatile analytical tool with purpose-made capillary electrophoresis coupled to contactless conductivity detection: Application to antibiotics quality control in Vietnam

In this study, the development of our purpose-made capacitively coupled contactless conductivity detection (C⁴D) for CE is reported. These systems have been employed as a simple, versatile, and cost-effective analytical tool. CE-C⁴D devices, whose principle is based on the control of the ion movements under an electrical field, can be constructed even with a modest financial budget and limited infrastructure. A featured application was developed for quality control of antimicrobial drugs using CE-C⁴D, with most recent work on determination of aminoglycoside and glycopeptide antibiotics being communicated. For aminoglycosides, the development of CE-C⁴D methods was adapted to two categories. The first one includes drugs (liquid or powder form) for intravenous injection, containing either amikacin, streptomycin, kanamycin A, or kanamycin B. The second one covers drugs for eye drops (liquid or ointment form), containing either neomycin, tobramycin, or polymyxin. The CE-C⁴D method development was also made for determination of some popular glycopeptide antibiotics in Vietnam, including vancomycin and teicoplanin. The best detection limit achieved using the developed CE-C⁴D methods was 0.5 mg/L. Good agreement between results from CE-C⁴D and the confirmation method (HPLC- Photometric Diode Array ) was achieved, with their result deviations less than 8% and 13% for aminoglycoside and glycopeptide antibiotics, respectively.