A New Chemometrically Assisted UV Spectrophotometric Method for Simultaneous Determination of Tamsulosin and Dutasteride in Their Pharmaceutical Mixture

Abstract

Background Tamsulosin (TAM) and dutasteride (DUT) are ranked among the most frequently prescribed therapies in urology. Interestingly, studies have also been carried out on TAM/DUT in terms of their ability to protect against recent COVID-19. However, very few studies were reported for their simultaneous quantification in their combined dosage form and were mainly based on chromatographic analysis. Subsequently, it is very important to offer a simple, selective, sensitive, and rapid method for the quantification of TAM and DUT in their challenging dosage form. Objective In this study, a new chemometrically assisted UV spectrophotometric method has been presented for the quantification of TAM and DUT without any prior separation. Methods For the calibration set, a partial factorial experimental design was used, resulting in 25 mixtures with central levels of 20 and 25 μg/mL for TAM and DUT, respectively. In addition, to assess the predictive ability of the developed approaches, another central composite design of 13 samples was used as a validation set. Post-processing by chemometric analysis of the recorded zero-order UV spectra of these sets has been applied. These chemometric approaches include partial least squares (PLS) and genetic algorithm (GA), as an effective variable selection technique, coupled with PLS. Results The models’ validation criteria displayed excellent recoveries and lower errors of prediction. Conclusion The proposed models were effectively used to determine TAM/DUT in their combined dosage form, and statistical comparison with the reported method revealed satisfactory results. Highlights Overall, this work presents powerful simple, selective, sensitive, and precise methods for simultaneous quantification of TAM/DUT in their dosage form with satisfactory results. The predictive ability and accuracy of the developed methods offer the opportunity to be employed as a quality control technique for the routine analysis of TAM/DUT when chromatographic instruments are not available.