Development of spectrophotometric methods for the determination of cefixime in capsule and suspension by making complex with cobalt chloride and cobalt nitrate

The purpose of the study was to develop a new spectrophotometric method for the determination of cefixime trihydrate using cobalt salts i.e. cobalt chloride and cobalt nitrate. cefixime exhibited λmax at 256nm in cobalt chloride while cobalt nitrate complexes showed λmax at 211nm,cefixime obeyed bear's law after complexation with these salts for concentration ranges at 0.1-0.6μg/ml and 0.1-1.5μg/ml respectively. the proposed method was validated using international council of harmonization (ich) guidelines. limits of detection (lod) as well as limit of quantitation (loq) for cobalt chloride were 0.03μg/ml and 0.01μg/ml while these values were 0.09μg/ml and 0.05μg/ml for cobalt nitrate respectively. statistical approaches showed that result of proposed methods are not only significant but also reproducible and more reliable than currently reported methods. percentage relative standard deviation (%rsd) values were less than 2% for proposed methods which illustrate the good precision. in addition these methods do not need any prior extraction to estimate drug in raw material,capsule and suspension compared to other reported methods. it was concluded that proposed methods are versatile,cheaper,less time consuming,selective and rapid for the determination of cefixime in these formulations.