Urinary drug screening receives a little 'micro-magic'

Urinary drug screening may be set to enter a new era as researchers have successfully combined two miniaturisation techniques to provide rapid screening that has the potential for automation.

Microextraction and microfluidic techniques have been combined for the extraction of drugs from urine and their transfer to an electrospray mass spec. Although both techniques are well founded, the combination of the two provides a novel way of urinary drug screening.

Raimo Ketola and Teemu Nissila from Helsinki teamed up with Katrine Nielsen and Frants Lauritsen from the University of Copenhagen and have recently reported their results in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry. The report highlights the potential for large-scale drug screening applications.

Drug screening is significantly accelerated using the combined method. If automation of the extraction and injection processes is possible, then the analysis time would be cut down to only one minute. The sensitivity and reproducibility of the samples would also be improved. This would provide a rapid screening procedure for drugs in urine which would be suitable for clinical and forensic settings.

Posted by Ben Evans