Development of a highly sensitive high-performance thin-layer chromatography method for the screening and simultaneous determination of sofosbuvir, daclatasvir, and ledipasvir in their pure forms and their different pharmaceutical formulations.

The combination of sofosbuvir and daclatasvir or sofosbuvir and ledipasvir is now widely used as an ideal treatment for hepatitis C virus infection. For this purpose, a simple, sensitive, accurate, economic, and precise high-performance thin-layer chromatography was developed and validated for the determination of sofosbuvir, daclatasvir, and ledipasvir in their pure form as well as their different pharmaceutical products. The method used Merck high-performance thin-layer chromatography aluminum plates precoated with silica gel 60 F254 as a stationary phase and mobile phase consisting of methylene chloride/methanol/ethyl acetate/ammonia (25%) (6:1:4:1, v/v/v/v). This system was found to give compact symmetric peaks of sofosbuvir, daclatasvir, and ledipasvir with retardation factors of 0.27 ± 0.01, 0.50 ± 0.007, and 0.68 ± 0.008, respectively. The densitometric scanner was set at 275 nm using a deuterium lamp. The calibration curves were linear over the range of 100-3000 ng/spot for sofosbuvir, and daclatasvir, and range of 50-3000 ng/spot for ledipasvir. The detection limits were 22.5, 31.90, and 15.80 for sofosbuvir, daclatasvir, and ledipasvir. The quantitation limits were 67.50, 95.60, and 47.50 for sofosbuvir, daclatasvir, and ledipasvir. The proposed method was validated according to International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines and the results were acceptable.