Several matters of forensic investigations involve the need of toxicological analysis, including lethal intoxication (suicide or homicide), environmental and workplace testing, abuse of pharmaceutical and/or illicit drugs as well withdrawal control, driving impairment or re-licensing, drug facilitated sexual assault, post-mortem toxicology, pre-natal exposure to drugs, doping control (1,2). The most utilized specimen are urine, blood and hair, each one having its own peculiar meaning, diagnostic window and analytical approach. To meet the high demand for drug screening in biological samples, toxicology laboratories are continuously encouraged to update their procedures, in order to target an increasing number of drugs but also achieve rapid, simple and sensitive analyses with reduced sample preparation and fast instrumental processing, so as to increase the overall sample-throughput. Our group recently developed and fully validated two screening procedures which take advantage from the last development of UHPLC-MS/MS technology. The first method is a sensitive multi-class and multiresidual screening method for detecting drugs of abuse or metabolites in hair samples using a dedicated UHPLC-MS/MS protocol. The second UHPLC-MS/MS method achieves the determination of 88 pharmaceutical drugs and metabolites in (post-mortem) blood samples, including the substances most frequently involved in acute intoxications and authoptic reports. For both methods, the analytical performances were highly satisfactory and relatively uniform for all the studied analytes, so that the protocols could find easy application in routine analysis for toxicological investigations. Some real cases will be presented.
Innovative UHPLC-MS/MS strategies for the detection of drugs of abuse, pharmaceutical drugs and metabolites in forensic investigations
A. Salomone;GERACE, ENRICO;PIRRO, VALENTINA;VINCENTI, Marco
2012-01-01
Abstract
Several matters of forensic investigations involve the need of toxicological analysis, including lethal intoxication (suicide or homicide), environmental and workplace testing, abuse of pharmaceutical and/or illicit drugs as well withdrawal control, driving impairment or re-licensing, drug facilitated sexual assault, post-mortem toxicology, pre-natal exposure to drugs, doping control (1,2). The most utilized specimen are urine, blood and hair, each one having its own peculiar meaning, diagnostic window and analytical approach. To meet the high demand for drug screening in biological samples, toxicology laboratories are continuously encouraged to update their procedures, in order to target an increasing number of drugs but also achieve rapid, simple and sensitive analyses with reduced sample preparation and fast instrumental processing, so as to increase the overall sample-throughput. Our group recently developed and fully validated two screening procedures which take advantage from the last development of UHPLC-MS/MS technology. The first method is a sensitive multi-class and multiresidual screening method for detecting drugs of abuse or metabolites in hair samples using a dedicated UHPLC-MS/MS protocol. The second UHPLC-MS/MS method achieves the determination of 88 pharmaceutical drugs and metabolites in (post-mortem) blood samples, including the substances most frequently involved in acute intoxications and authoptic reports. For both methods, the analytical performances were highly satisfactory and relatively uniform for all the studied analytes, so that the protocols could find easy application in routine analysis for toxicological investigations. Some real cases will be presented.
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