Experimental and Computational Evaluation of Chloranilic Acid as an Universal Chromogenic Reagent for the Development of a Novel 96-Microwell Spectrophotometric Assay for Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors

The tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are chemotherapeutic drugs used for the targeted therapy of various types of cancer. This work discusses the experimental and computational evaluation of chloranilic acid (CLA) as a universal chromogenic reagent for developing a novel 96-microwell spectrophotometric assay (MW-SPA) for TKIs. The reaction resulted in an instantaneous formation of intensely purple colored products with TKIs. Spectrophotometric results confirmed that the reactions proceeded via the formation of charge-transfer complexes (CTCs). The physical parameters were determined for the CTCs of all TKIs. Computational calculations and molecular modelling for the CTCs were conducted, and the site(s) of interaction on each TKI molecule were determined. Under the optimized conditions, Beer’s law correlating the absorbances of the CTCs with the concentrations of TKIs were obeyed in the range of 10–500 µg/well with good correlation coefficients (0.9993–0.9998). The proposed MW-SPA fully validated and successfully applied for the determination of all TKIs in their bulk forms and pharmaceutical formulations (tablets). The proposed MW-SPA is the first assay that can analyze all the TKIs on a single assay system without modifications in the detection wavelength. The advantages of the proposed MW-SPA are simple, economic and, more importantly, have high throughput.