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Jan 14, 2019 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
Part 1: Cannabis is Legal in Canada – How Did We Get Here? Part 2: Canada’s Focus on Cannabis Quality and Safety Intensifies
Welcome to the third 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.
‘Protecting public health and safety by allowing adults access to legal cannabis’ is high on Health Canada’s agenda. In the last blog, we explored the tests involved in ensuring legal cannabis is safe, here we will examine the technology behind these tests.
What the Analytical Testing Lab Needs to KnowWhether cultivation, processing, analyzing or selling, anyone planning to operate in the market must be a cannabis license holder under the Act. Legal cannabis products must be produced within the rules of the law and undergo rigorous testing before they can be made available to the public.
Regulatory standards for cannabis testing are expected to evolve, and it would be fair to say that the cannabis testing landscape is not only uncertain, but it is complex. Here’s a quick rundown on where things stand at the time of writing this blog:
With the challenges outlined above, the question is:
What Techniques Best Suit These Testing Demands?Labs need the right instruments and methods to stay ahead of regulation, keep up with demand and deliver fast and reliable results – better than the competition. We believe this can be achieved with the most advanced technologies that offer high-throughput validated methods for accurate results, with complete workflows that combine tests into a single analysis.
The industry is now turning to instruments that are proven in more established applications, such as food and pharma, and have already been applied to cannabis testing with great success. High-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is one of these technologies.
Cannabis has historically been monitored by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) requiring complicated sample preparation with derivatization and relatively long sample run times. LC-MS/MS has now emerged as one of the most reliable and robust high-throughput analytical methods available, tackling the demands of cannabis testing head on.
How We Can HelpSCIEX offers everything licensed analytical testing labs, regulatory laboratories, and licensed producers need to perform a wide variety of tests to Health Canada standards while cutting tests down to record time.
We have pioneered standardized testing methods that enable you to overcome the complex analytical nature of cannabis in regulated markets. Best-in-class LC-MS/MS technology has been applied to potency, terpene, pesticide, and contaminant analysis, allowing you to match all chemical residues to the lower possible limit, within a single instrument. Users experience superior selectivity, sensitivity, and ruggedness without extensive sample preparation.
To help your lab meet demand and get ahead of new regulations, we have put together an exclusive free cannabis testing info kit packed with useful information, including methods and solutions to common screening challenges.
Fill out the form on your right to download the info kit, and take the first step towards fast, accurate, and compliant cannabis testing.
As an analytical strategy, middle-down mass spectrometry (MS) workflows characterize biotherapeutic proteins by analyzing large, digested protein fragments or defined subunits, rather than fully intact proteins (top-down) or digested peptides (bottom-up). A middle-down strategy combines the strengths of top-down and bottom-up approaches by delivering high sequence coverage and structural specificity while maintaining relatively simple sample preparation. In practice, middle-down analysis enables accurate mass measurement, rapid sequence confirmation, and localization of key post-translational modifications (PTMs) on protein subunits that are directly relevant to product quality.
In biopharmaceutical development, sequence variants (SV) are considered an inherent risk of producing complex proteins in living systems. Sequence variants are unintended changes to the amino acid sequence of a biotherapeutic and can be caused by errors in transcription or translation in the host cell, or cell culture and process conditions. Detailed analysis of SVs is important in process and product development to ensure the drug’s safety and efficacy. Even low‑level sequence variants can have significant implications for product quality, safety, and efficacy, making their accurate detection and characterization a critical requirement across development, process optimization, and regulatory submission.
CE‑SDS remains a cornerstone assay for characterizing fragmentation, aggregation, and product‑related impurities in therapeutic proteins. UV detection has been the long‑standing standard. However, it frequently struggles with baseline noise, limited sensitivity for minor fragments, and subjective integration.
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