Introduction Customer Experience Day (CX Day) is a special occasion for SCIEX, celebrated every first Tuesday in October. It’s a day dedicated to recognizing the incredible value of our customers and the relentless dedication of our associates who strive to make...
At the heart of everything we do is ensuring that your workflows and team are empowered to achieve optimal results with your SCIEX instruments, software, consumables, and services. Every interaction with SCIEX is designed to support your success through the dedication...
You probably have heard of testing blood and urine samples for the presence of drugs and their metabolites. But do you know about the benefits of hair and nail analysis? In a recent webinar, Tina Binz, Deputy Head of the Center for Forensic Hair Analysis, University of Zurich, discussed the benefits of developing comprehensive and sensitive LC-MS/MS for the detection of low-level drugs and metabolites in keratinized matrices.
LC-MS/MS is a powerful analytical tool in forensic toxicology testing that can support a variety of testing regimes such as screening, confirmation and quantitative workflows. More specifically, analysis of NPS using LC-MS/MS provides many advantages, including the ability to reliably detect new drugs and their metabolites from a variety of biological matrices.
The development of analytical methods for the detection and quantitation of drugs and metabolites in a range of biological matrices is a challenging process. Forensic toxicology labs need a reproducible and reliable methodology to ensure the robustness of the data and the quality of the results. They also need robust and sensitive instrumentation that can detect drugs at trace levels with high specificity, especially when it comes to novel psychoactive substances (NPS), which can be difficult to monitor and control.
Unplanned downtime is a formidable adversary that businesses across various industries strive to minimize. Defined as the unexpected interruption of regular operations, unplanned downtime can wreak havoc on productivity, profitability and customer satisfaction. In this article, we delve into the causes of unplanned downtime, its far-reaching consequences and strategies to mitigate its impact.
The increased prevalence of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) in the recreational drug market has been a major contributor to the ongoing opioid crisis. NPS are newly emerging compounds designed to mimic existing recreational drugs and have become potent alternatives to controlled opioids. They are also frequently used as adulterants or cutting agents for commonly abused drugs. Continuous abuse of these substances can result in severe intoxication and, in some cases, fatal overdose.
Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are compounds designed to mimic existing recreational drugs. The emergence of NPS has changed the landscape of the synthetic drug market. While previously the market had a limited number of compounds belonging to a few chemical groups, with NPS it now has hundreds of compounds. The European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction is currently monitoring 730 substances, with more being identified each year.
In this final installment of our “Back to the new basics” series, we take one more look at analytical techniques and best practices in the lab, and opportunities to improve efficiency. Here, we explore the basic principles of high-performance liquid chromatography (LC) and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS), and how these techniques can affect a lab’s efficiency and productivity.
We’ve all heard about the doping scandal that shocked the cycling world at the 1998 Tour de France, right? Well, because of that scandal, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) arranged a World Conference on Doping that brought together all parties involved in the fight against doping. The Lausanne Declaration on Doping in Sport1 was adopted by the conference in February 1999 and included a call for an international anti-doping agency to be operational for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was established in November 1999 to answer that call.