Development of the First Metabolite-based LC-MS Urine Drug Screening Procedure

Screening for toxic compounds or drugs (TCD) in different body samples is one of the major tasks in clinical and forensic toxicology as well as in doping control. Several procedures using different separation and/or detection systems were used for screening purposes in the field of analytical toxicology [1]. While immunoassays allow a quick screening for a limited number of targets, chromatographic methods like photodiode array detector coupled to liquid chromatography (LC) allows a broad screening for TCD. However, mass spectrometry (MS) is widely used in bioanalytics as this technique provides higher sensitivity and identification power in comparison to other methods. Different hyphenations of MS and their current use in analytical toxicology are reviewed elsewhere [2-8] but will be shortly discussed as follows: