Voltammetric behavior of solifenacin succinate on gold, glassy carbon and boron-doped diamond electrodes: Stability testing and determination

Abstract

The anticholinergic drug, solifenacin, is frequently used for the treatment of the urological tract for urinary incontinence, and urinary frequency. The development of reliable and effective solifenacin electrochemical sensors is of great importance for the pharmaceutical industry and clinical practice. In this work, the electrochemical behavior of solifenacin succinate (SOL) was studied using three different working electrodes: gold (Au), glassy carbon (GCE) and boron-doped diamond electrode (BDDE). The cyclic voltammetric (CV) measurements performed in 0.05 M NaHCO3 indicated that the SOL oxidation process is irreversible and diffusion-controlled at all investigated working electrodes. Afterwards, the testing of SOL electrochemical stability and the possibility of its electrochemical degradation was performed at the Au electrode by the cycling of the potential during 3 h and continuously to 6 h. It was shown that the SOL was electrochemically transformed into another electroactive species and its degradation was excluded. For electroanalytical application, the anodically pretreated BDDE (+2.0 V; 30 s) was selected. Various experimental parameters were optimized, including the pH of the aqueous Britton-Robinson (B-R) buffer as a supporting electrolyte (from pH 2.0 to 11.98) and the most intensive peak of the target analyte was at pH 11.0, so this pH value was chosen as the optimum for further measurements. Based on the correlation of the SOL peak intensity and different concentrations, the developed differential pulse voltammetric (DPV) method was characterized by a linear concentration range from 0.041 to 2.50 µM, with a correlation coefficient of 0.999, and a relative standard deviation of 0.3 %. Taking into account the sensitivity of the developed DPV method towards the electrochemical oxidation of SOL, a very low detection limit of 0.012 µM in the model system was achieved. The BDDE showed adequate selectivity for SOL in the presence of the investigated interferents. The obtained results indicate that the BDDE with an optimized DPV method could be applied for the trace-level electroanalytical determination of SOL in human urine sample with excellent recovery and reproducibility.