Nonaqueous cephalosporin suspension for parenteral administration: cefazolin sodium

An observational study of the effect of vibration on the caking of suspensions in oily vehicles

An oily suspension of penethamate (PNT) that was physically stable on storage, caked solidly during road/air transport. This paper reports on the caking behaviour of PNT oily suspension formulations exposed to vibrations in a lab-based test designed to simulate road/air transport. The lab-test was used to study the effects of container type (glass v PET) and formulation (oil, surfactant type and concentration) on the physical stability of suspension under vibration. Redispersibility of the sediment was lower at longer vibrations times and at higher intensity of vibration. Caking on vibration was strongly influenced by the type of container (caking in glass but not in PET) possibly due to tribo-charging of particles. Caking on vibration was dependent on the formulation: type and concentration of surfactant; type of oil. The physical stability of oily suspensions, and the effect of vibration are two areas which have been largely neglected in the pharmaceutical literature. This paper discusses some potential mechanisms for the observations but studies using fully characterised materials are required. Finally we conclude that static testing of physical stability of oily suspensions is not sufficient and that a vibrational stress test is required.

Identification and separation of five cephalosporins by micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography

The cephalosporins are a group of structurally related, broad spectrum beta-lactam antibiotics isolated from the mold Cephalosporium. Methods of analysis of cephalosporin antibiotics include microbiological, titrimetric and chromatographic assays. Chromatographic techniques, including high-performance liquid chromatography, have been extensively utilized for specific and sensitive assays of beta-lactam antibiotics in a variety of matrices, i.e. clinical and pharmaceutical. Several of the drawbacks of HPLC in the analysis of cephalosporins in food and biological samples include matrix interferences and low resolution due to column adsorption. Recently, the applicability of capillary electrophoresis to the resolution of beta-lactam antibiotics has been demonstrated in the literature. In this paper we employed sodium borate and an anionic surfactant, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), in a separation technique called micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography with UV detection, to resolve a mixture of five cephalosporins--cefuroxime, cephalexin, cephapirin, cefamandole nafate and cephalothin. The presence of SDS in the running buffer above the critical micelle concentration, creates a pseudostationary phase enabling high-efficiency chromatographic separations. The effect of the ion-pairing reagent, pentanesulfonic acid sodium salt, on the resolution of the cephalosporin mixture in conjunction with SDS was also examined.