Applications of LIBS in drug analysis

A number of analytical techniques are available for the compositional analysis of pharmaceutical drugs, but these techniques are expensive, destructive, and laboratory based. The drug industry needs a less expensive, quick, nondestructive technique that can be used for the in situ, online analysis of drug samples. For more than two decades, laser-induced plasma spectroscopy, also known as laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), has been adopted as a viable technique in various fields of compositional analysis of materials. LIBS has a wide range of applications in the drug industry such as the identification of active pharmaceutical ingredients, excipients, and binders. In this chapter, we try to illustrate the capability of LIBS, in conjunction with statistical methods, for the compositional analysis of a variety of drug samples. Chemometric analysis of a LIBS spectral dataset has been found to be very useful in the discrimination of drug samples with similar elemental compositions.