Validated stability indicating liquid chromatographic determination of ebastine in pharmaceuticals after pre column derivatization: Application to tablets and content uniformity testing

Greens appraisal of validated stability indicating RP-HPLC method and forced degradation study for quantification of Ebastine in wastewater and dosage form

OBJECTIVES

Allergic rhinitis and chronic idiopathic urticaria are common conditions triggered by environmental irritants, stress, and certain foods. The FDA has recently announced that the efficacy and safety of Ebastine (EBS) have been thoroughly evaluated and confirmed. This study considered using various tools to assess their greenness. We used AGREEprep, analytical eco-scale (ESA), and analytical method volume intensity (AMVI) to evaluate the greenness of the validated stability-indicating method and a forced degradation study. This allowed for easy determination and quantitation of EBS in wastewater and dosage form.

METHODS

The method was established on Symmetry RP-C18 (150mm×4.6mm,5μm) using mobile phase, which can be prepared by mixing buffer solution of pH 3 with acetonitrile in a ratio of (37.5: 62.5, v/v) in addition to dissolving 0.72 gm of sodium lauryl sulfate in the final solution. The separation process was executed at a flow rate of 1.5mL/min and 5μL injection volume with UV detection at 254nm. Linearity was conducted for EBS in the 5-50μg/mL range. Different validation parameters were investigated, including accuracy, precision, robustness, and specificity.

RESULTS

The limits of both detection and quantification were 0.84μg/mL and 2.57μg/mL for EBS. The recovery percentages of EBS were found to be 101.01% and 101.02% for wastewater and pharmaceutical formulations, respectively.

CONCLUSION

According to International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) guidelines, a forced degradation study of EBS was evaluated, including acid, base hydrolysis, and oxidative hydrolysis using hydrogen peroxide and photolytic and thermal degradation. The highest degradation was achieved by acid hydrolysis. The safety and efficacy of EBS were evaluated via a safety comparative profile study.

A Critical Review of Physicochemical Properties and Analytical Methods Applied to Quantitative Determination of Ebastine

Allergic diseases are the most common conditions in children and the second most frequent in adults. Currently, there are two well-defined generations of antihistamines, those belonging to first generation, with inherent side effects such as drowsiness and anticholinergic effects. These side effects are often attributed to their high lipophilicity and high affinity for brain H1 receptors. The ebastine is a modern antihistaminic drug belongs to the second generation and has lower lipophilicity, which diminish the undesirable side effects. To ensure the quality, efficacy, safety, and effectiveness of ebastine drug products, efficient and reliable analytical methods are mandatory. Besides official compendial methods, alternative methods are often developed and used in quality control of pharmaceuticals as well as in pharmacokinetic studies. In this work, we present a critical review on characteristics, physicochemical properties, and analytical methods applied in the analysis of ebastine.

Crystal structure analysis of ebastine [4-(4-benzhydryloxy-1-piperidyl)-1-(4-tert-butylphenyl) butan-1-one]: an oral histamine antagonist

Ebastine belongs to the category of second-generation non-sedating H1 receptor antagonists and is chiefly used for the treatment of allergic rhinitis and chronic urticaria. The present paper reports findings on the crystal and molecular structure of ebastine, employing the technique of single-crystal X-ray diffraction. Ebastine crystallizes in the monoclinicP21/cspace group with unit-cell dimensionsa= 16.5890 (12),b= 10.9575 (8),c= 16.6795 (11) Å, β = 113.623 (2)°,V= 2777.8 (3) Å3,Z= 4 and calculated density amounting to 1.123 Mg m−3. The structure factor value was observed 1016 and finalR= 0.0496 for 4360 unique reflections. The piperidine ring in the ebastine molecule was found to exist in a chair conformation, and the C—N bond length was 1.459 (3) Å, thereby showing good agreement with the standard C—N bond length of 1.472 Å.

Using an innovative Quality-by-Design approach for development of a stability indicating UHPLC method for ebastine in the API and pharmaceutical formulations

A stability-indicating ultra high performance liquid chromatographic (UHPLC) method has been developed for purity testing of ebastine and its pharmaceutical formulations. Successful chromatographic separation of the API from impurities was achieved on a Waters Acquity UPLC BEH C18, 50 mm × 2.1 mm, 1.7 μm particle size column with gradient elution of 10 mM acetate buffer pH 6.2 and a mixture of acetonitrile/2-propanol (1:1) as the mobile phase. Incorporating Quality by Design (QbD) principles to the method development approach by using the chromatography modeling software DryLab4 allows the visualization of a "Design Space", a region in which changes to method parameters will not significantly affect the results as defined in the ICH guideline Q8 (R2). A verification study demonstrated that the established model for Design Space is accurate with a relative error of prediction of only 0.6%. The method was fully validated for specificity, linearity, accuracy and precision, and robustness in compliance to the ICH guideline Q2 (R1). The method was found to be linear in the concentration range from the quantification limit (LOQ) to 125% of the specification limit for ebastine and each of the impurities with correlation coefficients of not less than 0.999. The recovery rate was between 98.15 and 100.30% for each impurity. The repeatability and intermediate precision (RSD) were less than 3.2% for ebastine and each of the impurities. The robustness of the developed method was studied by varying the six parameters: gradient time, temperature, ternary composition of the eluent, flow rate and start and end concentration of the gradient at 3 levels (+1, 0, -1). The resulting 729 experiments were performed in silico from the previously constructed model for Design Space and showed that the required resolution of 2.0 can be reached in all experiments. To prove the stability-indicating performance of the method, forced degradation (acid and base hydrolysis, oxidation, photolytic and thermal stress conditions) of ebastine was carried out. Baseline separation could be achieved for all peaks of the impurities, the degradation products and the API. Total run time was only 4 min, which is an impressive 40-fold increase in productivity in comparison to the method published in the Ph. Eur. monograph and allowed purity testing of more than 360 samples per day.