Development and preliminary validation of a fast GC-NPD/MS method for drug screening of blood samples

Various drugs such as hypnotics, stimulants and opiates have all been abused due to the excitement and euphoria that they produce therefore drug testing is a fundamental tool to determine drug exposure in many different fields of forensic and clinical toxicology. Gas chromatography, GC is one of these tools that are used to analyse coroner's samples for the presence fo drugs. Hampshire Scientific Services recently installed a new 'fast GC' system which has to be validated and a method developed so that it can be used on coroner's samples. The work undertaken was performed according to United Kingdom Accreditation Service's guidelines and specific guidelines produced by the laboratory. Alongside the preliminary validation, separate method developments were performed to ensure that the system was detecting the drugs that would become part of the validation. The outcome of all the validation and development is to ensure that the samples are analysed rapidly with a high sensitivity so any drugs can be detected. The preliminary validation covered several different abused drug groups so that a wide variety can be analysed with confidence and to a highly detailed analytical level. The new system is four times quicker than the older system and therefore is much more cost-effective and therefore beneficial for the laboratory. The results show that a high number of drugs are detected by the fast gc system although varied in concnetration within the blood. The system produced blanks with no crossover from samples that were analysed before regardless of concentration. The preliminary work and the method development that has already been completed means that a full validation of the system can be undertaken according to UKAS regulations