Development and UV-VIS Spectrophotometric analysis of an ease-of-use pediatric oral solution of dexamethasone for personalized therapies

Abstract

The usage of dexamethasone for pediatric applications is a well-known issue. In the present study, we developed an oral dexamethasone solution formulation especially aimed for dose-dependent personalized therapies and having excipients known as not harmful to be safely used in pediatrics. The aim of this study was to prepare an easy-of- use pediatric oral solution of dexamethasone and develop an UV/VIS Spectrophotometric method for the evaluation of the stability and quality control of the developed formulation. The primary source of dexamethasone for preparation of the oral pediatric solution was the dexamethasone one-time injectable solutions. This allowed the formulation to be easily prepared in basic laboratory conditions. Dexamethasone content and stability of the formulation were ensured by quantification using the developed UV/VIS Spectrophotometric method validated based on ICH Q2 (R1) guidelines. Simple, fast, reliable, and validated spectrophotometric analysis of dexamethasone was carried out at 269 nm wavelength and the method was linear in a range of 1.00 to 50.00 μg mL–1.The developed formulation was stable at 4 °C at least for three weeks when protected from daylight. The other stability conditions (ambient temperature and -20 °C) were also evaluated for the assays. Although the methodology used in this study contains simple processes which can be easily adapted to basic laboratory conditions, the results were satisfactory to prepare an ease-of-use pediatric oral solution of dexamethasone for personalized medicine. The validated UV/VIS Spectrophotometric method was selective for the formulation and easily applied for the quality control and stability studies of the samples. Such formulations could be helpful for health professionals in managing real-life corticosteroid treatment application problems especially for pediatrics in hospital pharmacy.

Keywords

• Dexamethasone
• pediatrics
• personalized medicine
• UV-VIS spectroptrophotometry
• oral solution

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