Development of rapid methodologies for the isolation and quantitation of drug metabolites by differential mobility spectrometry - mass spectrometry

Clinical and forensic toxicology laboratories are inundated with thousands of samples requiring lengthy chromatographic separations prior to mass spectrometry. Here, we employ differential mobility spectrometry (DMS) interfaced to nano-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry to provide a rapid ion filtration technique for the separation of ions in gas phase media prior to mass spectral analysis on a DMS-integrated AB SCIEX API 3000 triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer. DMS is efficient at the rapid separation of ions under ambient conditions and provides many advantages when used as an ion filtration technique in tandem with mass spectrometry (MS) and MS/MS. Our studies evaluated DMS-MS/MS as a rapid, quantitative platform for the analysis of drug metabolites isolated from urine samples. In targeted applications, five metabolites of common drugs of abuse were effectively and rapidly separated using isopropanol and ethyl acetate as transport gas modifiers, eliminating the gas chromatography or liquid chromatography-based separations commonly employed in clinical and forensic toxicology laboratories. Calibration curves were prepared for the selected drug metabolites utilizing deuterated internal standards for quantitative purposes. The feasibility of separating and quantitating drug metabolites in a rapid fashion was evaluated by compensation voltage stepping followed by multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) detection. Rapid profiling of clinical and forensic toxicology samples could help to address an urgent need within the scientific community by developing high-throughput analytical methodologies, which could reduce significant case backlogs present within these laboratories.