Impurity profile analysis of drug products containing acetylsalicylic acid: a chemometric approach

In this work attention is focused on impurity profile analysis in combination with infrared spectroscopy and chemometric methods. This approach is considered as an alternative to generally complex and time-consuming classic analytical techniques such as liquid chromatography. Various strategies for constructing descriptive models able to identify relations among drug impurity profiles hidden in multivariate chromatographic data sets are also presented and discussed. The hierarchical (cluster analysis) and non-hierarchical segmentation algorithms (k-means method) and principal component analysis are applied to gain an overview of the similarities and dissimilarities among impurity profiles of acetylsalicylic acid formulations. A tree regression algorithm based on infrared spectra is used to predict the relative content of impurities in the drug products investigated. Satisfactory predictive abilities of the models derived indicate the possibility of implementing them in the quality control of drug products.