A Different Perspective on the Characterization of a New Degradation Product of Flibanserin with HPLC-DAD-ESI-IT-TOF-MSn and its Pharmaceutical Formulation Analysis with Inter-Laboratory Comparison.

Abstract

Flibanserin (FLB) was firstly synthesized as an antidepressant drug; however, due to its enhancing effects on sexual activity, it was approved for treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder in women in 2015. The aim of this study was to develop a new and fully validated HPLC method for analysis of FLB in pharmaceutical formulations besides its degradation products, and identification of possible formation mechanisms by using HPLC-DAD-ESI-IT-TOF-MSn. The HPLC separation was achieved in an Supelco Ascentis® Express series phenyl hexyl column (100 × 4.6 mm, ID 2.7µm). The mobile phase was acetonitrile-ammonium acetate solution (50:50, v/v, 10 mM, pH 5.4) mixture, which was pumped at the rate of 0.5 mL/min. Chromatography, detection and structural identification was performed by using LCMS-IT-TOF instrument (Shimadzu, Japan). 1-(2-(4-(3-hydroxy-5-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)piperazine-1-yl)ethyl)-1,3-dihydro-2H-benzo[d]imidazol-2-one is proposed as a novel degradation product, with a mass of 407.1695, and a formula of C20H21F3N4O2 with a margin of error about 0.001 ppm. The developed method is applicable with 98% accuracy within 2.5-50.0 µg/mL range. The LOD and LOQ was about 500 ng/mL and 1.50 µg/mL, respectively. The transferability and variation between laboratories were tested by inter-laboratory comparison and evaluated with one-way analysis of variance. A novel FLB degradation product, which was produced under oxidative forced degradation condition was observed and identified for the first time; in addition, the formation kinetics of the degradation product, besides decomposition of FLB was studied. Furthermore, an inter-laboratory comparison was carried out and application of the proposed method on pseudo Addyi® sample was tested using both instrument configurations. A novel stability indicating assay method was developed and fully validated according to ICH (Q2)R1 for the analysis of FLB in the pharmaceutical preparations. A new degradation product was identified in the oxidative forced degradation condition and characterized using HPLC-DAD-ESI-IT-TOF-MS3. Moreover, the possible mechanism and the formation kinetic of the degradation product were revealed. In addition, the developed method was transferred to another LC-PDA instrument for inter-laboratory comparison. Finally, the current method was applied to pseudo formulation of Addy® in both instruments and ANOVA was applied for evaluation.