Toxicology labs have been required to maintain large compound lists of known drugs of abuse (DoA) for a long time; however, in recent history, novel psychoactive substances (NPS) have added to their challenging workload. New NPS are constantly disappearing as fast as they emerge, making it difficult to stay on top of which compounds are necessary to add and maintain within laboratory testing scopes. The development and optimisation of liquid chromatography (LC) separations is time-consuming and costly, often requiring several steps, including literature research, column selection, method scouting, method development, and method optimisation.
Restek developed Pro EZLC in order to try to reduce the burden on instrument uptime, standard and solvent costs, and labour. This instrument-free modelling tool includes a comprehensive DoA library. In this work, we look at add 38 NPS compounds split into three categories: synthetic opioids and toxic adulterants, designer benzodiazepines, and stimulants and synthetic cannabinoids. Using Pro EZLC, methods were designed and optimised for each of these NPS groups before transferring to an LC-MS/MS system to confirm calculated results against experimental data. The acceptance criterion for transfer was ±15 seconds between modelled and experimental retention time for each compound. All three compound class methods were shown to transfer successfully within the specification outlined.
