Exploring High Resolution Accurate Mass Orbitrap Technology for Comprehensive Urine Drug Screening

This webinar presents the experience gained at our laboratory with comprehensive urine drug screening for clinical research using the Thermo Scientific™ Q Exactive™ hybrid quadrupole-Orbitrap high resolution mass spectrometer and Thermo Scientific™ Accela™ UPLC.

Our journey started with establishing a database with monoisotopic masses for the drugs we were interested in, including a variety of metabolite, as well as a very simple dilute-and-shoot protocol, using full data scan/ddMS2 and fast LC gradient. We then used available drug standards to build an extensive library comprising of mass fragmentation spectra and retention times of 1200 compounds. For metabolites that had no standards available, accurate mass was used to extract the mass peak from the chromatograms of known users and corresponding MS2 spectra were collected.

Using the Q Exactive Orbitrap mass spectrometer, we are able to answer relevant questions for urine drug screening. Is this drug absent or present in the urine? Are both parent and metabolites present, or only the metabolite(s)? Which metabolites? Does the metabolite pattern relate to recent or past use? Using this technology we were also able to identify current designer drugs of abuse such synthetic cannabinoids and bath salts.

For forensic toxicology use only.