LC-MS User Meeting 2020 - Clinical Toxicology - English Morning Session

The Clin- ical and Forensic Toxicology laboratories are rapidly evolving as an increasing number of assays are moved to LC-MS. Toxicological screening is starving for reliable, comprehensive and always up-to-date databases to cope with the continuous appearance on the market of new psychoactive substances. Reducing the number of false positives and false negatives can significantly reduce the laboratory workload as well as improving its reputation. The opportunity to putatively identify unreported substances is also becoming a topic of increasing interest for the user. Multi-channel systems, with multiple LCs working in parallel on the same mass spectrometer taking advantage of its idle times, can dramatically improve the daily throughput. TurboFlow technology for online sample extraction can also help to overcome the bottleneck of extensive offline sample preparation. This part of the EMEA LC-MS users' meeting will interest those involved in Clinical and Forensic laboratories, focusing on target and unknown toxicological screening, quantitative confirmation and are interested in increased throughput analytical approaches.

You will learn about how high-resolution Thermo Scientific Orbitrap mass spectrometry can support both screening and quantitative approaches. You will also have a flavour of how multi-channel and TurboFlow technologies can speed up routine work in your lab.

11:00 BST (12:00 CEST - Prague) | Changing the Strategy of the Coroner Service of Ireland: The Invisible Killer

• Speaker: Mairead Webster, Technical information manager, The State Laboratory - Kildare, Ireland

11:30 BST (12:30 CEST - Prague) | Workflow for the detection of Fentanyl and Nor-Fentanyl after abuse of Fentanyl skin patches?

• Speaker: Petra Gerhards, Regional Marketing Manager, Chromatography Consumables, Thermo Fisher Scientific

12:00 BST (13:00 CEST - Prague) | Screening and Quantitation of Common Drugs and their Metabolites in Post-Mortem Samples using Liquid Chromatography-High Resolution Mass Spectrometry

• Speaker: Edmund Rab, Principal Clinical Scientist, Northern General Hospital - Sheffield, UK

12:30 BST (13:30 CEST - Prague) | Implementation of the ClinMass TDM Platform on a Thermo Scientific™ Q Exactive™ Plus

• Speaker: Katharina Kern, Lead Mass Spectrometry Group, R&D, RECIPE Chemicals + Instruments GmbH

Presenter: Petra Gerhards (Regional Marketing Manager, Chromatography Consumables, Thermo Fisher Scientific)

Petra's background is over 30 years of experience in the field of GCMS, SPE and LCMS. Since joining the EMEA Regional Marketing Team for CCS she has been involved in a lot of workflow solutions combining Vials and Closures with SPE solutions, GCMS and LCMS. She works with KOL`s on data for regional specific marketing campaigns, organizes inhouse seminars and works on customer specific solutions. Her main expertise is in the field of Doping and Drugs of Abuse analysis.

Presenter: Edmund Rab (Principal Clinical Scientist, Northern General Hospital - Sheffield, UK)

Dr Edmund Rab is a Principal Clinical Scientist working at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. He studied for a Master’s degree in Biological Chemistry at the University of Sheffield and remained at the university to complete a PhD in drug discovery. It was whilst working for his PhD that he encountered liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Upon completion of his PhD, Dr Rab joined the Scientist Training Programme for Clinical Scientists, training at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. After successfully completing the programme, Dr Rab took up his current position in the Department of Specialised Clinical Chemistry, where he has developed a number of assays for toxicological and endocrinology applications using high resolution and tandem mass spectrometry.

Presenter: Katharina Kern (Lead Mass Spectrometry Group, R&D, RECIPE Chemicals + Instruments GmbH)

After graduating from the Nuremberg Institute of Technology with a degree in Applied Biochemistry (Dipl. Ing. FH) in 2009, I started working with mass spectrometers right away. In the first 5 years of my career, I was developing and validating LC-MS/MS and GC-MS/MS methods for the determination of small molecules from biological matrices to be used in clinical studies.

In 2014, I joined RECIPE’s R&D team as a scientist in the mass spectrometry group. I was assigned project manager for development and validation of the TDM platform. After successfully launching the CE-IVD platform, installation and on-site support also became part of my responsibility.

As team lead of the mass spectrometry group, I support our scientists in the development of new LC-MS/MS complete kits and manage collaborations with business partners. In 2019, we started to implement our TDM platform on a Thermo Scientific™ Q Exactive™ Plus Hybrid Quadrupole-Orbitrap™ Mass Spectrometer™.