Rapid analysis of anthracycline antibiotics doxorubicin and daunorubicin by microchip capillary electrophoresis

Abstract A simple and rapid method has been developed for the analysis of anthracycline antibiotics doxorubicin (DOX) and daunorubicin (DAU) in human serum using mirochip-based capillary electrophoresis (CE) with laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) detection. In this study, method development included studies of the effect of buffer pH, buffer concentration, organic solvents and separation voltage on sensitivity and separation efficiencies for the CE separation of DOX and DAU. Acetonitrile was found to have significantly improved the sensitivity and separation efficiency. The method was validated with regard to reproducibilities, linearity and limit of detection (LOD). The optimum electrophoretic separation conditions were 10 mM sodium tetraborate buffer at pH 9.5 with 40% acetonitrile (V/V) and a separation voltage of 2.1 kV. DOX and DAU were separated in 60 s under the optimum separation conditions. Linear relationships were obtained between the concentration and peak area (or peak height) in the 1–75 µg mL − 1 range and with the detection limits of 0.3 and 0.2 μg mL − 1 for DOX and DAU, respectively. The stability of both migration time and peak height of the analytes showed relative standard deviations of less than 5% ( n  = 9). The potential of this method was verified by spiking a human serum sample with the two drugs and analyzing the recovery ratios.