Insights of different analytical approaches for estimation of budesonide as COVID-19 replication inhibitor in its novel combinations: green assessment with AGREE and GAPI approaches

Simple, direct, rapid, and sensitive HPLC and spectrophotometric methods were established for simultaneous estimation of a novel combination of budesonide and azelastine (BUD/AZL) in their laboratory-prepared mixture and dosage form according to the medicinally recommended ratio 1:4.28. Budesonide is an important inhalation corticosteroid that plays a vital role in the inhibition of COVID-19 replication and cytokine production. The first chromatographic method was created for the simultaneous estimation of BUD epimers in the presence of AZL with excellent efficiency in a relatively short chromatographic run (< 9 min). The separation of BUD epimers with AZL was carried out on a C(18) column using acetonitrile: phosphate buffer of pH 3.5 adjusted by 0.2 M orthophosphoric acid (40:60, v/v) as a mobile phase, UV detection at 230 nm and a flow rate of regulated at 2 mL/min. Besides, three spectrophotometric methods were applied for the simultaneous determination of the provided mixture adopting zero order, first order derivative, and ratio first derivative approaches. The Zero-order spectrophotometry was used for the determination of AZL in presence of BUD, where BUD shows no absorbance at 290 nm. The first derivative amplitude at 265 nm ((1)D(265)) (zero-crossing of AZL) and the ratio of first derivative amplitudes at 270 nm ((1)DD(270)) using 10.0 µg mL(−1) AZL as divisor was chosen for the simultaneous determination of BUD in the presence of AZL in the binary mixture. The proposed methods were found to be rectilinear in the concentration range of (0.4–40.0 µg mL(−1)) and (0.05–40.0 µg mL(−1)) for BUD and AZL, respectively in the HPLC method. Whereas the concentration range for AZL in the zero-order method was (1.0–35.0 µg mL(−1)) and for BUD in the first derivative and ratio derivative method was (6.0–20.0 µg mL(−1)). Validation of the suggested approaches according to the ICH criteria was performed. Furthermore, to ensure the proposed approaches' greenness, The AGREE and GAPI metrics were utilized, and the afforded results revealed an excellent greenness of the proposed approaches. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13065-023-00936-z.