RP-HPLC detection and dosage method for acrylic monomers and degradation products released from implanted medical devices

- Acrylic polymers released degradation products under oxidative and heating conditions.
- We present a RP-HPLC method for detection of acrylics degradation products.
- The method is efficient for polar and nonpolar compounds detection in saline matrices.
- Application on intraocular lenses confirmed the release of polar degradation products.

Acrylic copolymers are useful in medical therapeutics. As in dental implants or intraocular lenses, acrylics are present in many medical devices or drug adjuvants. Industrial using of acrylics is still important in painting or textile manufacturing. Scientific research background has proved that acrylic suffer for depolymerized and cross-linking mechanisms under heating and photo-oxidative conditions. Those aging processes could lead to release of unreacted monomers and degradation products.We developed a new RP-HPLC method with good resolution, recovery, linearity, detection and quantification limits that is efficient for acrylic monomers quantification in in vitro and in vivo saline solution matrices. This method allows the detection of copolymer and medical devices degradation products too. Both the limit of quantification and the limit of detection for monomers and degradation products are above cytotoxic concentrations for human epithelial cells. Those biological results confirm the interest of the method for dosage of unreacted acrylics after polymerization and for the research of degradation products in body fluids as aqueous humor.