Determination of paclitaxel in hyaluronic acid polymeric micelles in rat blood by protein precipitation-micelle breaking method: Application to a pharmacokinetic study

An efficient dissociation of paclitaxel (PTX) from the home-made hyaluronic acid-octadecyl (HA-C18) polymeric micelles formulation in rat blood could not be achieved using previously published PTX analytical methods. So, we intended to develop the micelle-breaking method to determine paclitaxel encapsulated in the HA-C18 polymeric micelles in blood. The pretreatment method of blood samples adopted a simple one-step protein precipitation-micelle breaking process with methanol as micelle-breaking and protein precipitant solvents for complete extraction of PTX from HA-C18 micelles in blood. The micelle breaking efficiency of methanol was as high as 97.7%. Separation was carried out by gradient elution on an Acquity UPLC BEH C18 column with a mobile phase consisting of water (containing 0.1% formic acid) and acetonitrile. A total single run time was as short as 3.0 min. Detection was performed by triple-quadrupole mass spectrometry with positive electrospray ionization as source ionization in multiple-reaction monitoring mode at m/z 854.3 → 286.2 for PTX and m/z 808.5 → 527.3 for the internal standard, docetaxel. The method demonstrated good linearity at the concentrations ranging from 20 to 10,000 ng/mL. The intra- and inter-day relative standard deviations were less than 9.9%. The mean extraction recoveries of PTX and IS were 94.7% and 87.5%, respectively. In summary, the methanol protein precipitation-micelle breaking method could extract PTX completely from the polymeric micelles. Finally, the method was successfully applied to a pharmacokinetic study of the home-made PTX-loaded HA-C18 polymeric micelles and Taxol solution after intravenous administration in rats.