Quantification and Structure Elucidation of in Vivo Bevacizumab Modification in Rabbit Vitreous Humor after Intravitreal Injection

Off-label and intravitreal use of bevacizumab, a recombinant immunoglobulin against VEGF, has been practiced widely for ophthalmic treatments. However, longitudinal data of its intravitreal status is unavailable due to a lack of reliable methods for bevacizumab determination. Thus its pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are uncertain. We developed and validated a high performance liquid chromatographic method to determine bevacizumab in vitreous humor and utilized a novel strategy to assess in vivo temporal binding changes by affinity chromatography. Mass spectrometry and tandem mass spectrometry detection were used for structural evaluation. The coefficient of variation (CV) for intrabatch imprecision varied from 0.5 to 14.3% and for interbatch imprecision from 1.9 to 11.6%. The linearity was over 0.9982, lower limit of quantification 1.95 μg, recoveries over 95%, and accuracy between 90 and 112% over the range of 1.95–250 μg of bevacizumab in 100 μL of vitreous humor. Blank vitreous humor showed no interference peak. It was stable at room temperature for 5 h. Bevacizumab elimination in the vitreous followed first order kinetics with half-life as 5.7 days and elimination rate as 0.1221 day^–1. Peptide mapping and tandem mass spectrometry revealed structural modifications of the in vivo bevacizumab mainly on the heavy chain in both variable and constant regions 7 days after intravitreal injection. Minor changes were also discovered on the light chain. Affinity chromatography showed significant affinity changes in samples 21 days after intravitreal injection. The changes were consistent with structural modifications as found in endothelial cell migration assays results. In conclusion, we have established a robust chromatographic method for determination of bevacizumab and strategies with affinity chromatography and molecular mass detection that revealed bevacizumab structural and possible functional changes in vitreous.