Development and validation of UHPLC methods for antibiotics

Due to the increasing resistance of micro-organisms against frequently used antibiotics, there is a growing interest to re-investigate older antibiotics, like for example apramycin, sulfadoxine, josamycin, dihydrostreptomycin, ampicillin, amoxicillin and capreomycin. These drugs are on the market for several years already, but the methods to analyse them are not always up-to-date. So, it is hard to find proper methods for their quality control. The European Pharmacopoeia for example has not published monographs for apramycin and sulfadoxine, while the methods to check the related substances of the other antibiotics last up to 90 min. The aim of this project is to develop and validate state-of-the-art analytical methods to check the quality of some of those medicines. For this purpose, ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) is nowadays the method of choice. In a next step, in vivo studies in human will be performed to collect more information about the pharmacokinetic behavior.