Development and validation of a stability-indicating HPLC-UV method for the determination of alizapride and its degradation products

A stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatography procedure has been developed for the determination of alizapride (AL) and its main degradation products alizapride carboxylic acid (AL-CA) and alizapride N-oxide (AL-NO2) in drug substance and product. The method was developed based on forced degradation data obtained by HPLC-MS analysis. Indeed AL underwent chemical degradation by acid/base catalyzed hydrolysis and oxidation the main degradation products being AL-CA and AL-NO2 respectively. The separation and quantisation were achieved on a 150-mm reverse phase column with a hydrophilic linkage between silica particles and hydrophobic alkyl chains. The mobile phase was constituted (flow rate 1.5 mL min^-1) of eluant A: aqueous acetate buffer (pH 4.0; 20 mM) and eluant B: CH₃OH using a gradient elution and detection of analytes at 225 nm. The method showed good linearity for the AL, AL-CA, AL-NO2 mixture in the 25-75, 1-15 and 1-15 μg mL^-1 ranges respectively, being all the square of the correlation coefficients greater than 0.999. The precision, determined in terms of intra-day and inter-day precisions and expressed as RSDs were 0.8, 1.3 and 2.1% and 1.0, 1.7, 4.8% for AL, AL-CA and AL-NO2 respectively. The method demonstrated also to be accurate; indeed the average recoveries, at 100% and 0.2% of the target assay concentration, were 100.5, 98.6, and 96.8% for AL, AL-CA and AL-NO2 respectively. The robustness was also evaluated by variations of mobile phase composition and pH. Finally, the applicability of the method was evaluated in commercial dosage form analysis as well as in stability studies.