Bioanalytical Method Development and Validation of Dapagliflozin in Human Plasma Using RP-HPLC Method.

Background: Dapagliflozin is used for controlling blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. It is a sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor, which enhances the elimination of blood glucose through the urine by inhibiting the protein involved in the transport mechanism of SGLT2. Dapagliflozin requires a selective and sensitive bioanalytical RP-HPLC method.

Aim: Reverse phase - high performance liquid chromatography technique was used to develop and validate a bioanalytical method for the quantification of dapagliflozin (DAPA) in human plasma.

Methods: The internal standard (IS) used was azilsartan medoxomil. In isocratic mode, the mobile phase consisted of 50:50 v/v acetonitrile and 0.1% orthophosphoric acid in water at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The chromatogram was recorded at 224 nm. For the chromatographic separation, a Kromasil C18 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm; 5μ) was used. The drug was extracted from plasma samples by the protein precipitation method.

Result and discussion: The chromatographic run time was 15 min. Dapagliflozin and IS eluted at 4.6 and 5.7 min, respectively. The method was selective and sensitive, with a limit of quantification of 1.50 µg/mL. The developed method was found to be linear in the range of 1.50-60 µg/mL (r2 = 0.9994). The accuracy and precision obtained from six sets of quality control (QC) samples ranged from 96.23% to 108.67% and 1.35% to 3.19%, respectively. The extraction recovery of dapagliflozin in three QC samples ranged from 87.39% to 90.78%. The bench-top stability, stock solution stability, stability of processed extracted samples at room temperature, and freeze-thaw stability evaluations showed no evidence of degradation of dapagliflozin.

Conclusion: The stability, selectivity, sensitivity, and reproducibility of the developed method make it suitable for the determination of dapagliflozin in human plasma.