Estimation of partition, free and specific diffusion coefficients of paclitaxel and taxanes in a fixed bed by moment analysis: experimental, modeling and simulation studies

Paclitaxel, as known Taxol^®, is an important agent in cancer treatment, founded in mixture with many structural analogs, or taxanes, present in natural source or plant tissue culture broth. The adsorption techniques are used in the purification of placlitaxel from that complex mixture, but despite of the strategy it is important to know the basic parameters associated with any process, such as isotherms and mass transfer parameters. In this paper is presented a simple model to estimate these parameters by moment analysis. After to consider linear isotherm for adsorption, the partition coefficient, free and effective diffusion coefficients of paclitaxel and four major components, in a plant tissue culture broth, were estimated from the first and second moments of peaks in pulse-elution chromatograms. The experimental chromatograms at two flow rates are compared with those ones from model, also proposed in this work. The experimental results of free diffusion coefficient are compared with that ones from the Literature