Chromatographic Separation of Fluoroquinolone Drugs and Drug Degradation Profile Monitoring through Quality-by-Design Concept.

The article reports on the development of an efficient, robust and sensitive HPLC-DAD method for the simultaneous determination of five fluoroquinolone-based antimicrobial drugs, namely ciprofloxacin, moxifloxacin, norfloxacin, ofloxacin and pefloxacin in both aquatic and tablet formulations. The robustness of the high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection (HPLC-DAD) method has been evaluated through the concepts of quality-by-design (QbD) and full factorial design of experiments (DoEs), using a Minitab 17 statistical tool. The proposed method offers sequential separation with well-defined peak shape and resolution, and has also been evaluated by following international council for harmonization (ICH) pharmaceutical guidelines.