Development of a Fast Liquid Chromatography Method With a Chemometric Approach Based on Box-Behnken Design for the Determination of Antidepressants in Pharmaceutical Formulations

Objective: The objective of this work was to develop a liquid chromatographic method for the quantification of antidepressants, namely duloxetine (DXN), fluoxetine (FXN), citalopram (CIT), paroxetine (PXN), and sertraline (SRN), by a chemometric approach based on Box-Behnken design. Material and Method: After initial experiments to determine significant parameters, a Box-Behnken design consisting of 17 experiment sets was carried out. All separations were conducted using an Agilent Poroshell 120 EC-C18 analytical column (75 mm × 4.6 mm × 2.7 µm). Result and Discussion: The optimum levels of pH, acetonitrile ratio, and flow rate were determined with the desirability function as 2.7, 38%, and 1.1 ml/min, respectively. The differences (<8%) between predicted optimum responses and experimentally obtained results proved the model's suitability. Limits of detection and limits of quantification values were in the ranges of 0.17-0.29 µg/ml and 0.53-0.89 µg/ml, respectively. The feasibility of the technique was proven by analyzing PXN and DXN formulations.