Simultaneous Determination of Posaconazole and Hemp Seed Oil in Nanomicelles through RP-HPLC via a Quality-by-Design Approach

The present study involves the development of a reverse-phase HPLC method employing the quality-by-design methodology for the estimation of posaconazole and hemp seed oil simultaneously in nanomicelles formulation. The successful separation of posaconazole and hemp seed oil was achieved together, and this is the first study to develop and quantify posaconazole and hemp seed oil nanomicelles with linoleic acid as the internal standard and developed a dual drug analytical method employing a quality-by-design approach. The study was performed on a Shimadzu Prominence-I LC-2030C 3D Plus HPLC system with a PDA detector and the Shim-pack Solar C8 column (250 mm × 4.6 mm × 5 μm) for analysis with a mobile phase ratio of methanol:water (80:20% v/v) maintaining the flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The final wavelength was selected as 240 nm and the elution of hemp seed oil and posaconazole was obtained at 2.7 and 4.6 min, respectively, with a maximum run time of 8.0 min. Box Behnken design was employed to optimize the method, keeping the retention time, peak area, and theoretical plates as dependent variables, while the mobile phase composition, flow rate, and wavelengths were chosen as independent variables. Parameters such as specificity, accuracy, robustness, linearity, sensitivity, precision, ruggedness, and forced degradation study were performed to validate the method. The calibration curves of posaconazole and hemp seed oil were determined to be linear throughout the range for concentration. The suggested approach can be effectively utilized for estimating the content of drugs from their nanoformulation and proved suitable for both in vivo and in vitro research.