The development of fast and easy-to-use methods for gemcitabine detection is of great interest for pharmaceutical formulation control in both research laboratories and hospitals. In this study, we report a simple, fast and direct electrochemical method for gemcitabine detection using a boron-doped diamond electrode. The electrochemical oxidation of gemcitabine on a boron-doped diamond electrode was found to be irreversible in differential pulse voltammetry, and scan rate influence studies demonstrated that the process is diffusion-controlled. The influence of the pH and supporting electrolytes were also tested, and the optimized differential pulse voltammetry method was linear in the range of 2.5-50 μg/mL, with a detection limit of 0.85 μg/mL in phosphate-buffered saline (pH 7.4; 0.1 M). An amperometric method was also optimized for gemcitabine detection. The linear range of the method was 0.5-65 μg/mL in phosphate-buffered saline of pH 7.4 as well as pH 5.5, the limit of detection being 0.15 μg/mL. The optimized differential pulse voltammetry and amperometric detection strategies were successfully applied to pharmaceutical formulations, and the results were compared to those obtained by high-performance liquid chromatography and UV-Vis spectrophotometry with good correlations.
Keywords: amperometry; boron-doped diamond electrode; differential pulse voltammetry; gemcitabine; pharmaceutical formulations.