Development and Validation of Stability-Indicating RP-HPLC Method for Simultaneous Determination of Metformin HCl and Glimepiride in Fixed-Dose Combination.

A simple reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography method was developed and validated for simultaneous determination of Metformin hydrochloride (MET) and Glimepiride (GLM) in combination and estimation of their principal degradation products. The separation was achieved using JASCO Finepak SIL (250 mm × 4.6 mm i.d. 5 μm) at ambient temperature. The optimized mobile phase composed of an aqueous phase (20 mM phosphate buffer, adjusted to pH 3.0) and an organic phase (methanol:acetonitrile; 62.5:37.5) in the ratio of 80:20. The flow rate was 1 mL/minute, and the analytes were detected at 230 nm. The developed method was validated for accuracy, precision, specificity, linearity, and sensitivity. The chromatographic analysis time was approximately six minutes with the complete resolution of MET (Rt = 2.75 minutes) and GLM (Rt = 5.87 minutes). The method exhibited good linearity over the range of 5-30 μg/mL for MET and 1-10 μg/mL for GLM. The drugs in combination were subjected to various stress degradation studies as per the International Conference Harmonization (ICH) guidelines. Results obtained from the stress degradation studies revealed that the developed method is applicable for stability studies.