Spectrofluorimetric determination of moxifloxacin in tablets, human urine and serum

Abstract

A spectrofluorimetric method to determine the antibiotic moxifloxacin is proposed and was applied to pharmaceuticals, human urine and serum. The fluorimetric method allows the determination of 30–300 ng mL⁻¹ moxifloxacin in aqueous solution containing phosphoric acid–phosphate buffer (pH 8.3) with λ_exc= 287 nm and λ_em= 465 nm. Detection and quantification limits were 10 and 30 ng mL⁻¹, respectively, with a relative standard deviation (n = 10) of 2%. This method was applied to the determination of moxifloxacin in three Spanish commercial pharmaceutical formulations. Another variant of the method in micellar medium allows the direct measurement of moxifloxacin in human serum and urine by standard additions. The enhanced fluorescence of moxifloxacin in 8 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) solution at pH 4.0 (acetic acid–acetate buffer) for λ_exc = 294 nm and λ_em = 503 nm shows the same linear range as the aqueous method with a 25% lower slope (with detection and quantification limits of 15 and 60 ng mL⁻¹, respectively, and a relative standard deviation of 1.3%), but permits the background fluorescence for urine and serum blanks to be minimized. Hence, sufficient sensitivity is reached to determine therapeutic concentrations of the drug in urine (average recovery 102 ± 2%) and serum (average recovery 105 ± 2%) samples.