Simultaneous determination of reboxetine and O-desethylreboxetine enantiomers using enantioselective reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography

Current knowledge of stereoselective pharmacokinetics and different potencies of drug enantiomers requires the performance of stereoselective analysis during therapeutic drug monitoring in clinical practice. However, in the case of the new antidepressant drug reboxetine, no effort has been made so far to find a such a suitable system. Therefore, as a step towards developing an enantioselective bioanalytical method for reboxetine and the O-desethylreboxetine metabolite, three stereoselective chromatographic approaches have been investigated. Several chiral columns were tested, among them Chiral-AGP, ChiraGrom 2 and Chiral-CBH, which were able to simultaneously separate the two compounds into enantiomers in total running times of 28, 18 and 12 min, respectively.