Comprehensive Forensic Toxicological Analysis of Designer Drugs

Abstract

When a positive result occurs, confirmatory methods, such as gas chromatography (GC) or liquid chromatography (LC) coupled with mass spectrometry (MS), are required for more sensitive and specific analyses. In recent years, the need to study the activities of these compounds in screening assays as well as to develop confirmatory techniques to detect them in biological specimens has been recognized. Severe intoxications and fatalities have been encountered with emerging designer drugs, presenting analytical challenges for detection and identification of such novel compounds. The first major task of this research was to evaluate the performance of commercially available immunoassays to determine if designer drugs were cross-reactive. The second major task was to develop and validate a confirmatory method, using LC-MS, to identify and quantify these designer drugs in biological specimens.vi Cross-reactivity towards the cathinone derivatives was found to be minimal.Several other phenethylamines demonstrated cross-reactivity at low concentrations, but results were consistent with those published by the assay manufacturer or as reported in the literature. Current immunoassay-based screening methods may not be ideal for presumptively identifying most designer drugs, including the "bath salts." For this reason, an LC-MS based confirmatory method was developed for 32 compounds, including eight cathinone derivatives, with limits of quantification in the range of 1-10 ng/mL. The method was fully validated for selectivity, matrix effects, stability, recovery, precision, and accuracy. In order to compare the screening and confirmatory techniques, several human specimens were analyzed to demonstrate the importance of using a specific analytical method, such as LC-MS, to detect designer drugs in serum as immunoassays lack cross-reactivity with the novel compounds. Overall, minimal crossreactivity was observed, highlighting the conclusion that these presumptive screens cannot detect many of the designer drugs and that a confirmatory technique, such as the LC-MS, is required for the comprehensive forensic toxicological analysis of designer drugs.vii

Preparation of Translated, Scaled, and Rotated ATS Drugs 3D Molecular Structure for the Validation of 3D Moment Invariants-based Molecular Descriptors

“…These innovative designs proven to be a challenge for law enforcement entities and introduce a new layer of difficulties in detecting and identifying using existing laboratory techniques, which sometimes lead to both false positive and negative results, and thus, incorrectly outline the outcome of criminal justice court [7][8][9][10]. Thus, there is a continuous demand for the improvement of current laboratory techniques to recognize common characteristics of the ATS drugs.…”