Avaliação do equilíbrio de adsorção e projeto de condições de separação de praziquantel por cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência (CLAE)

Abstract

Praziquantel is a high spectrum anthelmintic drug used in the treatment of all types of schistosomiasis. In Brazil, the racemic mixture is used on the drug manufacture. It is known that the R-PZQ enantiomeric species is the one which has the anthelmintic effect and a less bitter taste. Thus, the solid formulations based on R-PZQ only, would have half of the dosage and the liquid formulations would have a less bitter taste. To obtain pure enantiomers chiral chromatography is a promising technique which produces high purity enantiomers. In this work the praziquantel enantiomers separation was obtained on a cellulose tris(3-chlorine-4-methyl-phenyl-carbamate) chiral stationary phase (CSP), commercially known as Lux Cellulose-2, by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Experiments with diluted solution (1 g/L) and concentrated solutions (5, 10, 15 and 20 g/L) were carried out. On these experiments the effects of the mobile phase flow rate variation (0,5, 1 e 2 mL/min) and the injection volume (20, 60 e 100µL) have been studied. On these baseline separations were achieved indicating high column efficiency for the required separation. Experiments with 40 g/L PZQ solution and a mobile phase flow rate of 1 mL/min were performed aiming to find conditions on which overlapping peaks occur. The enantiomers were well separated on the tested injection volumes (100, 140 and 180 µL), indicating an overlapping on the injection volume of 250 µL yielding a production of 533 mg per day at the limit of baseline separation. From the results one can predict a nonlinear adsorption equilibrium isotherm behavior. Parameters of the competitive Langmuir isotherm were estimated from experiments in the concentration range 5g/L to 20 g/L by a hybrid method between the retention time method and the inverse method by an analytical solution of the ideal model. These parameters were used on a computer program developed in Fortran® aiming at the prediction of the chromatographic profiles by the Equilibrium Dispersive Model. The profiles obtained from the simulation represent well the experimental data when comparing the front mass retention times of both enantiomers. The estimated parameters were also used on the prediction of the chromatographic profiles obtained for 40 g/L conditions and showed satisfactory results when prediction errors were taken into account.