For Drug Analysis, Paper Spray MS Is Faster Than LC/MS

Paper spray mass spectrometry provides comparable results to conventional liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry for measuring drug properties, according to Ryan D. Espy, a graduate student with R. Graham Cooks at Purdue University. Paper spray is an MS method that requires no sample preparation beyond simply spotting the sample on a piece of paper. It could reduce the amount of time and resources needed to study administered drugs’ fate in the body. Such pharmacokinetic analysis is an integral part of the drug development process. Paper spray requires just 10 μL of blood. Working with scientists at AbbVie, a pharmaceutical research company, Espy dosed rats with tamoxifen and then used paper spray MS and LC/MS to measure drug concentrations in blood samples. The maximum drug concentration measured by both techniques was almost identical: 42 ng/mL by the paper spray method and 43 ng/mL by LC/MS. But the paper spray approach was much faster: A set of 50 samples took eight hours to run with LC/MS, but only 40 minutes with paper spray MS.