Automated Sample Preparation of Whole Blood for Therapeutic Drug Monitoring and Diagnostics by LC-MS using a Commercial Autosampler

Automated sample preparation reduces the costs per sample and avoids sample handling errors. This is especially important in therapeutic drug monitoring or diagnostics based on blood samples. The use of robots is well established in these fields since a long time. Usually expensive and highly specialized pipetting robots are used for a high number of samples. However, most of these systems are not designed with a direct interface for LC-MS applications. 

In this project the parameters necessary to automatically prepare whole blood samples for online LC-MS applications in the field of diagnostics and TDM have been investigated. A strategy and the most important parameters are shown for the optimization of a PAL RTC autosampler
for the preparation of whole blood.