Analysis of reboxtine, a novel antidepressant drug, in pharmaceutical tablets by capillary electrophoresis and derivative spectrophotometry

The recent antidepressant drug reboxetine was quantified in pharmaceutical
tablets by derivative spectrophotometry and capillary zone
electrophoresis. The feasible sample pretreatment consists of a single
extraction with a pH 2.5 phosphate buffer, centrifugation and dilution.
For the spectrophotometric assay, the fourth derivative of the absorbance
was used which gave satisfactory results in terms of accuracy (mean
recovery 99.7 %) and precision (mean RSD % 3.4 %). The electrophoretic
experiments were carried out using the shortest effective length of the
capillary (8.5 cm) in order to obtain a very rapid separation of
reboxetine and dibenzepine used as the internal standard. using a pH 2.5,
50 mM phosphate buffer as the background electrolyte, each analysis lasted
less than 2.5 min. Accuracy (101.3 %) and precision (1.%) were very good.