Enantiomeric separation of ketoconazole and terconazole antifungals by electrokinetic chromatography: Rapid quantitative analysis of ketoconazole in pharmaceutical formulations.

EKC using a neutral CD as chiral selector was applied in this work to the development of a method enabling the enantiomeric separation of ketoconazole and terconazole antifungals. The influence of different experimental conditions such as temperature, CD concentration, pH, and nature and concentration of the buffer on the enantiomeric resolution of the compounds studied was investigated. The use of 10 mM heptakis-(2,3,6-tri-O-methyl)-beta-CD in a 100 mM phosphate buffer (pH 3.5) with a temperature of 15 degrees C allowed the separation of the enantiomers of ketoconazole and terconazole with high resolution (R(s) > 2.0). The rapid separation of ketoconazole enantiomers with an analysis time less than 3 min was carried out after fitting some experimental parameters. The developed method was applied to the determination of ketoconazole in different pharmaceutical formulations.