Automated Determination of Drugs of Abuse in Hair Samples – Application note

A fully automated sample preparation method has been developed and tested for extraction and analysis of drugs of abuse from hair samples. Performance was tested using hair samples spiked with cannabinoid standards. The automated sample preparation instru-mentation can be directly coupled to any analytical instrumentation for fully automated sample preparation and analysis.

Hair testing is a powerful tool routinely used for the detection of drugs of abuse in forensic and toxicology applications. The analysis of hair can be highly advantageous as it can provide prolonged detection, is non-invasive and provides chronological information about drug intake or chemical exposure, allowing patterns of drug abuse and abstinence to be established, in contrast to the analysis of body fluids. The window of detection is dramatically extended to weeks, months or even years when testing hair, and methods for evading urinalysis do not affect hair analysis.

However, current methodology routinely involves complex and time-consuming washing, homogenization, derivatisation, sample clean-up techniques and extraction techniques before analysis by GC/LC-MS(/MS). This is the driver for the development of automated sample preparation workflows which include direct coupling to the analytical instrumentation, providing fully automated sample preparation and analysis.

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