Quantitative determination of cyclic polylactic acid oligomers in serum by direct injection liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry

Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biodegradable polymer, currently used in pharmaceutical and surgical devices. There is a concern that cyclic polylactic acid (CPLA), which is a by-product of PLA synthesis, may be introduced into the human body as an undesirable contaminant. We carried out a quantitation investigation of the CPLA heptamer (CPLA-7) by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC–MS). We found that CPLA-7 binds strongly with serum proteins and that only 62% of CPLA-7 was recovered after routine deproteination; therefore, we directly injected serum into the LC–MS/MS system after passage through a bovine serum albumin (BSA)-coated chromatographic column and found the recovery of CPLA-7 was improved to 84%, and that the detection (S/N = 3) and quantitation limit (S/N = 10 and below 15% relative standard deviation) were 1.5 and 2.5 ng/mL, respectively. We conclude that direct injection LC–MS/MS, using a BSA column, is a simple and effective quantitative analysis method for CPLA in serum.