Drug screening is a necessary tool in postmortem investigations. Currently, however, drug screening itself can consume huge amounts of time and money in sample clean-up and analysis, and adding newly emerging compounds can be cumbersome. Paper spray mass spectrometry (PS-MS) provides an alternative method for drug screening that simplifies the screening process while still allowing for rapid and sensitive detection of a wide variety of drugs. The goal of this project was to develop a PS-MS based method to use as a screening procedure in postmortem toxicology. In consultation with AXIS Forensic Toxicology, we compiled a list of some 150 drugs, pharmaceuticals, and metabolites which represents the vast majority (~99%) of the compounds encountered in post-mortem drug screening. Initial screening cutoff objectives for these targets were set in consultation with AXIS and ranged from 1 to 30,000 ng/mL.
Paper Spray Mass Spectrometry for Rapid Drug and Drug Metabolite Screening Directly from Postmortem Blood Samples
NCJ Number
311600
Date Published
Unknown
Abstract