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Jun 3, 2019 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
Welcome to the second in a series of blogs from the cannabis team at SCIEX, designed to bring you up to speed and put you in the lead of the recently legalized cannabis market in Canada.
In the first blog, we introduced the Cannabis Act and what it means for the industry. Here we explore product safety and the related analytical testing requirements by answering your common questions.
Why Is Safety up There as a Top Priority?‘Protecting public health and safety by allowing adults access to legal cannabis’ is one of three top priorities of the Act. Regulation aims to ensure that cannabis is safe by eliminating potentially dangerous cultivation and processing practices. Strict rules and standards for producers cover, amongst other things, the types of cannabis products allowed for sale, packaging and labeling requirements, prohibiting the use of certain ingredients and good production practices.
How Will These Safety and Quality Standards Be Monitored?The short answer is through testing. There are strict rules throughout the supply chain from cultivation to sale, and rigorous testing has been federally mandated by Health Canada before cannabis products are made available to the public. In other words, legal cannabis products must meet the grade.
What Tests Need to Be Done and Why?Relative to other industries, safety and regulatory standards for cannabis testing are in their infancy. In Canada, there are already rules for testing in place for medical marijuana, but these are expected to become more comprehensive and stringent.
Laboratories certified for analytical testing must conduct all tests using validated methods on every lot or batch of cannabis to ensure requirements are met. Testing depends on the cannabis product class, but will typically include potency, purity, and safety.
Different provinces and territories will set acceptable limits through localized cannabis regulation.
How Can Testing Help Improve Supply?As cannabis sales shift to licensed outlets and more producers receive their federal stamp of approval, the demand for testing services is expected to rocket. Commercial cannabis testing is very competitive, and legalization will put pressure on the scientific community – who need the right instruments and methods to stay ahead of the curve and ahead of demand.
Using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), SCIEX has pioneered standardized testing methods to analyze potency, terpene, pesticides, and contaminants to Health Canada regulations.
To find out how LC-MS/MS helps analytical testing labs, regulatory laboratories, and licensed producers to clear the bottlenecks and supply safe, legal cannabis products to the Canadian market, check out the next blog in our series.
The Echo® MS+ system is a novel platform for Acoustic Ejection Mass Spectrometry (AEMS) and combines the speed of acoustic sampling with the selectivity of mass spectrometry. This platform has been designed for high throughput analysis of small and large molecules. The technology combines Acoustic Droplet Ejection (ADE), an Open Port Interface (OPI) and could be coupled with the SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system.
The Echo® MS+ system comprises of an open-port interface (OPI) and acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) module which could be coupled with a mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer could either be a SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system. This non-liquid chromatography based; high-throughput screening platform enables rapid analysis of compounds at speeds of up to 1 sample/second.
The ability to consistently achieve reproducible results on many complex samples across multiple days is critical to a routine clinical laboratory. Laboratories relying on analytical instrumentation require stability and robustness to perform a variety of screening and confirmatory assays with confidence. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has become the preferred analytical method in the clinical laboratory to reliably perform clinical testing as it provides best-in-class performance and reliability for the most challenging assays. LC-MS/MS offers the required levels of sensitivity and specificity for the detection and quantitation of molecules from complex biological samples, helping laboratories deliver highly accurate data for a variety of clinically relevant analytes across a wide range of assays.
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