Use of solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography for the determination of residual solvents in pharmaceutical products

The aim of this work was to prove that solid-phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatography could be used for the determination and quantification of residual solvents in drugs. Four solvents were selected for the experiments: ethanol, cyclohexane, triethylamine and pyridine, together with a model powdered drug substance. Several kinds of fibers, together with the extraction mode, were evaluated to determine the most appropriate one for the simultaneous extraction of the four solvents. The most promising conditions were obtained with the Carboxen-polydimethylsiloxane fiber in the headspace of the aqueous solution that contained the dissolved powder. A concentrated phosphate buffer was added to the aqueous solution to set the pH at 9.6 in order to enable good extraction of triethylamine, and the optimum extraction time was experimentally determined. A multi-criteria optimization was also carried out by means of design of experiments to optimize remaining parameters: the extraction temperature was set at 40 °C, the ionic strength at 1.77 mol l−1 and the volume of the aqueous solution at 7.2 ml. The method of standard additions was used for quantitative analysis. Its performance was evaluated and validated: the pooled RSD was around 15%, the limits of detection were all of the ppb level and the method was both accurate and linear.