NIJ Partners With Doctor to Develop Better Screening Method to Detect and Identify Drugs Postmortem
by Douglas Ankney
The illicit drug market is ever evolving, with new drugs (called “novel psychoactive substances” or “NPS”) steadily appearing to avoid detection and legal consequences. Between January 2018 and December 2023, NPS Discovery from the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education identified over 250 NPS in forensic samples from the U.S. and a total of “more than 15,000 detections across forensic populations nationally.”
With funding from the National Institute of Justice, Dr. Diane Moore, toxicologist for the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner, developed a testing method that “provides more detail about substances found in postmortem blood and tissues [with] a higher degree of confidence in their identification.” Moore’s department purchased instrumentation in a quest to develop “a method for rapid, large-scale blood sample screening” using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (“LC/MS/MS”) to improve their workflow as well as augment their current screening procedure that used gas chromatography mass spectrometry (“GC/MS”). The method Moore and her team developed exceeded their expectations.
The new method simultaneously scans for a wide range of drugs but still identifies and differentiates among closely related drugs. The team also developed a searchable library that includes relevant drugs found in present-day toxicology screens. The new method “has a high recovery across a range of compounds while improving sensitivity and specificity.” The team eliminated their older method for initial screening. Additionally, the new method reduced the number of tests needed per case, which reduced cost.
Moore said, “[t]he method we developed … is reproducible, [the output] is library searchable, and has a high correlation with other testing methods. It reduces the possibility of false positives and negatives in our work. It is an improvement over current methods using LC/MS/MS as a tool for drug identification.”
Source: forensicmag
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