Investigating Drugs of Abuse with Applied Biosystems LC/MS/MS Systems

Biochemists at the Leeds Teaching Hospital are delighted with their API 3000™ LC/MS/MS systems from Applied Biosystems, which they are using to develop methods for looking at drugs of abuse, their metabolites and chemicals used in the treatment of drug addiction.

Mr Keith Allen, Consultant Biochemist, explained, "The two API 3000 systems can analyse oral fluid and urine, looking for up to 30 compounds simultaneously using multiple reaction monitoring chromatography."

"The beauty of using LC/MS/MS in this way is that you can look for the metabolites too; drug identification and confirmation shouldn't just be based on a parent compound."

"We have already published a method using these systems to distinguish illicit heroin from pharmaceutical grade heroin in oral fluid samples and we are now working on a method that determines the effectiveness of naltrexone implants, used for treating heroin addiction, by measuring naltrexone and its metabolite naltrexol in oral fluid and serum."

Mr Allen concluded, "We are very happy with these systems. Compared to immunoassays, LC/MS/MS is certainly the way forward."