Development of an Innovative Quality by Design (QbD) Based Stability-Indicating HPLC Method and its Validation for Clofazimine from its Bulk and Pharmaceutical Dosage Forms

The present research work discusses the systematic Quality by Design (QbD) enabled development of a simple, rapid, economical, and stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for effective analysis of clofazimine (CFZ). An Ishikawa fish-bone diagram was constructed for initial risk assessment. Analytical target profile (ATP) was defined and critical analytical attributes (CAAs) were assigned to meet these ATP requirements. Taguchi design was applied for screening critical material attributes (CMAs) and critical process parameters (CPPs) making an impact on the assigned CAAs. The major contributing factors were finely tuned using 3 3 Box-Behnken design with numerical and graphical optimization. Further, the method was validated as per the ICH guidelines and force degradation studies were carried out under different stress conditions. The optimum chromatographic separation was accomplished using 75:25% v/v ratio of methanol and ammonium acetate buffer (0.01 mol/L) as the mobile phase at flow rate 1.0 mL/min, and UV detection at 284 nm. The developed HPLC method was found highly sensitive, specific with linearity ranging between 2 and 10 µg/mL, and correlation coefficient ( R 2 ) 0.9995. It showed high accuracy with % recovery between 99.68 and 100.44%. It depicted detection limit and quantitation limit of 0.0066 µg/mL and 0.0199 µg/mL, respectively. In force degradation studies the drug was found to be highly susceptible in alkaline stress conditions. The results reveal successful applicability of the method for the estimation of CFZ from its marketed formulation which can be wisely extrapolated to assess the CFZ from its other formulation systems and different biological samples.