Chemometric assisted natural DES based VA-DLLME-LC-MS/MS method for the quantitative determination of Garcinol in biofluids/tissues: A practical application to pharmacokinetics and biodistribution studies

Garcinol (GAR) is a polyisoprenylated benzophenone obtained from Garcinia indica used as anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory in traditional medicine and due to these activities, it possesses anticancer properties. It is considered to be a next generation epigenetic drug. A green solvent based analytical method which is efficient, sophisticated, and highly enriched has been developed for the quantitative analysis of GAR in biological samples (plasma, liver, kidney and spleen) with the use of deep eutectic solvent (DES) for its extraction. A series of 23 DESs were synthesized and out of which, Thymol (Th)-Terpeniol (T), 2:1 molar ratio with a more hydrophobic environment and high interaction efficiency between GAR and DES was identified for the better extraction from mice plasma and tissue samples. The Design of Experiment approaches like placket-burmann design and central composite design were used to optimize the method conditions. The method validation characteristics, such as limit of detection (0.193–0.237 ng/mL), limit of quantification (0.644–0.697 ng/mL), lower limit of quantification (0.5 ng/mL), broad range of linearity with R2 (0.9994–0.9997) with a percent recovery not less than 87% was observed, which are well within the acceptance criteria for a bioanalytical method. The enrichment factor is upto 53–60 folds, with high extraction efficiency (89–97%). The measurement uncertainty was estimated with an expanded uncertainty ranged between 10.9%–19.0%. The method developed and validated was effectively applied to examine the pharmacokinetic and biodistribution patterns for GAR in mice.