The chemical characterization of
extractables and leachables
(E&Ls)
is an important aspect of biosafety and biocompatibility assessment
in medical device industry. The advent of the body-contact use of
medical devices in patient treatment has introduced a potential source
for extractables and leachables as these medical devices are comprised
of various polymeric materials. Several industry working groups, the
FDA and USP, have recognized the guidance for chemical characterizations
and nontargeted analysis of medical device extracts, such as ISO 10993–18:2020.
The MS application of nontargeted analysis has played a critical role
in understanding the E&Ls from medical device extracts. However,
there have been very few reports about the MS based workflow with
nontargeted analysis for medical device extracts and there is little
guidance about the exact methodologies which should be used, even
though there is an urgent need for a clearly defined process for the
identification of medical device extracts. In this study, we demonstrated
an analytical LC/MS (liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry) workflow
using high resolution Exploris120 Orbitrap instrument for data acquisition
and Compound Discoverer 3.3 intelligent software for data processing
to profile the polymer related E&Ls from a balloon dilation catheter
device extracted with 40% ethanol. An E&L ID workflow combining
LC separation, data-informed MS acquisition strategy, MS information
mining (including adduct ions, MS information from both electrospray
ionization (ESI) (+) and ESI (−), in-source fragmentation,
common fragment ions (CFIs), common neutral losses (CNLs), and in
silico MS simulation was described with intelligent software processing
and manual data interpretation. The workflow developed in this study
was proven to be effective to provide a comprehensive profile of polymer
related degradation products, polymer impurities and additives including
surfactants, UV curing agent, antioxidants, and plasticizers for the
device analyzed. The classification of E&L compounds using CFIs
and CNLs was very effective to facilitate the identification of polymer
related impurities and extract the polymer related impurities with
common structures in a large data result set.