Pharmacokinetic study of indocyanine Green after intravenous administration by UPLC-MS/MS

Indocyanine Green is widely used in medical diagnosis and to evaluate liver function and other regional blood flows in clinical application or animal experiments. In this work, a sensitive and selective ultra performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) method for determination of Indocyanine Green in rat plasma was developed and validated. After addition of rutin as an internal standard (IS), protein precipitation by acetonitrile-methanol (9:1, v/v) was used to prepare samples. Chromatographic separation was achieved on a UPLC BEH C18 column (2.1 mm × 100 mm, 1.7 μm) with 0.1% formic acid and acetonitrile as the mobile phase with gradient elution. An electrospray ionization source was applied and operated in positive ion mode; multiple reactions monitoring (MRM) mode was used for quantification using target fragment ions m/z 753.4→330.2 for Indocyanine Green, and m/z 611.1→303.1 for IS. Calibration plots were linear throughout the range 20-5000 ng/mL for Indocyanine Green in rat plasma. Mean recoveries of Indocyanine Green in rat plasma ranged from 79.5% to 85.4%. RSD of intra-day and inter-day precision were both < 12%. The accuracy of the method was between 95.9% and 113.9%. The method was successfully applied to pharmacokinetic study of Indocyanine Green after intravenous administration.