Development and validation of UPLC method for simultaneous quantification of carvedilol and ivabradine in the presence of degradation products using DoE concept

A methodical design-of-experiments were performed by applying quality-by-design concepts to establish a design-space for simultaneous and rapid quantification of Carvedilol and Ivabradine by UPLC in the presence of degradation products. Response-surface, central-composite design, and quadratic model were employed for statistical assessment of experimental data using the Design-Expert software. Response variables such as resolution and retention time were analyzed statistically for chromatographic screening. During DoE study, various plots such as perturbation, contour, 3D and design-space plots were considered for method optimization. The method was developed using C8 [100 × 2.1 mm, 1.8 µ] UPLC column, mobile phase comprising 0.5% triethylamine buffer [pH 6.4] and acetonitrile in the ratio of 50:50 v/v, the flow rate of 0.4 mL minute−1 and UV detection at 285 nm for both Carvedilol and Ivabradine. The method was developed with a short run time of two minutes. The method was found to be linear in the range of 25.0–199.9 µg mL−1 and 8.9–21.3 µg mL−1 for Carvedilol and Ivabradine, respectively with a correlation coefficient of 0.9998 in each case. The recovery values were found in the range of 99.7–100.8% and 98.9–100.9% for Carvedilol and Ivabradine, respectively. The method was validated according to ICH Q2 (R1) guidelines.