Need an alternative to Toxi-Tubes?

UCT is well recognized for excellence in SPE. It is also the premiere supplier for sample prep products to the Forensic / Clinical Toxicology Community. Recently, it was announced that a general drug screening tool, the Toxi-Tubes® from Agilent, is being discontinued this fall. UCT understands that this is putting a lot of pressure on analysts to search for an alternate pathway to prepare their samples.  UCT has always provided the ideal solution for extraction and analysis - the Clean Screen suite of SPE cartridges. Clean Screen DAU is the flagship sorbent for all types of confirmations; however, it can also be used as a sorbent for screens. It extracts all weak acids, neutrals, and bases resulting in clean, reproducible extracts. This front end effort makes for a cleaner injection port and detector source on your GC/MS and/or LC/MS meaning more instrument up time and less noise in your chromatograms. If time is of critical importance - UCT also offers the Clean Screen Xcel range of SPE tubes. This product line requires no tube pre-conditioning, just a simple sample load, wash, and elute process. In addition to products to ease your transition to a new extraction technique, UCT also has a team of in-house and field application specialists that can help you with your transition to a new and better sample preparation for your biological matrices. Contact us at info@unitedchem.com or call us at 215-781-9255 or 800-385-3153 to discuss how we can help you keep the samples moving through your lab.

Toxi-Tubes® is a registered trademark of Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Fluoroamphetamine and Clean Screen DAU

The number of new designer drugs is steadily rising and forensic toxicologists are being faced with providing results to assist coroners/medical examiners/enforcement agencies regarding the concentrations of these drugs in various bio-fluids. Forensic toxicologists know that the most important step is isolating these drugs from different, and often difficult matrices.  

In a recent report in ToxTalk (October 2013, pp14-15), Dr. Mark Lichtenwalner and his team (Onondaga County Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Syracuse NY) were faced with not only identifying and confirming, but offering results of the concentrations of 4-Fluoroamphetamine in post mortem and ante mortem samples of blood. Dr. Lichtenwalner employed the Clean Screen ZSDAU020 SPE column as the sorbent for this analysis, along with GC-MS. From his data, he was able to provide the medical examiners with an accurate time line of the drug in this case. This published report demonstrates that the sorbents made by UCT are applicable not only to a wide range of well known drug classes and medications but are able to be used with newer  drug classes also.

UCT Poster Presentation at SOFT 2012

Hair analysis for the presence of illicit drugs is becoming one of the most challenging types of forensic toxicological analysis. At this years SOFT meeting, Dr. Jeff Hackett will be presenting the results of a collaborative project involving Amphetamines and Synthetic Cathinones in hair samples (Poster P03). In this work, UCT's flagship sorbent Clean Screen DAU (CSDAU206) was employed to produce a highly efficient validated methodology for the simultaneous extraction of 4 Amphetamines (Amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDA, and  MDMA) and 9 Synthetic Cathinones (Butylone, ethylone, flephedrone, mephedrone, methylone, methedrone, methcathinone (4-MEC), methylenedioxypyravalerone (MDPV) and pyravalerone) from 10 mg samples of hair. This new methodology which involves a short base digestion time followed by SPE and LC-MS/MS permits limits of quantitation (LOQ) of 0.05 ng/ mg, and detection(LOD) of 0.1 ng/ mg of sample to be achieved with excellent recoveries (greater than 95%) and minimal matrix effects (less than 6%). This newer methodology demonstrates the strength of the DAU sorbent in the analysis of not only familiar drugs but new and novel ones as well.

Clean Screen DAU and Analysis of New Pain Medication Drug

Forensic toxicologists that test post mortem samples are often challenged with extracting, identifying, and most importantly quantifying many drugs and their metabolites. This information is vital for medical examiners to offer interpretation into the cause and manner of a particular case. When toxicologists come across a new drug, the challenge becomes the development of a validated method. The Clean Screen DAU column, allows workers in the field of forensic toxicology to do exactly that. This powerful column, with its ability to extract a wide and diverse range of weak acid, neutral and basic drugs was utilized by Scott Larson and the toxicologists of Washington DC Chief Medical Examiner for the analysis of tapentadol and its metabolite N-desmethyltapentadol. The drug which is one of the newer pain medication drugs was extracted and quantified from post mortem samples of blood and tissue samples.

This work was reported in the July 2012 issue of Journal of Analytical Toxicology. The information gained from this analysis allows Forensic Toxicologists working in this field to be confident in the capability of the Clean Screen DAU to extract newer pain management drugs such as tapentadol.

UCT Presents work at TIAFT 2012 (June 3- 8th 2012)

As an active supporter of forensic endeavors around the world, UCT is proud to announce the presentation of research at this years annual meeting of The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists  (TIAFT). This years meeting is being held in the city of Hamamatsu (Japan) and brings together the worlds best toxicologists to discuss new developments in the area of forensic toxicology. UCT is known around the globe for its SPE sorbents and methodologies for assisting analysts extract, confirm and quantify drugs in various types of matrices.

The work being presented at TIAFT2012 involves the analysis of amphetamine type drugs (Amphetamine, Methamphetamine, MDA, amd MDMA) in small samples of hair (10 mg). The extraction was performed (after base digestion of samples) using UCT's flagship sorbent Clean Screen DAU (CSDAU206). Not only was the sorbent able to isolate the drugs, but the highly purified extract when tested by LC-MS/MS showed minimal matrix effects (<6%) and high recoveries (>95%) showing why this sorbent is highly recognised around the world as the market leader in forensic and clinical toxicological analyses for not only the amphetamine drugs but a wide and diverse range of drugs, poisons, and other medications often faced by analysts in these facilities.  

Analysis of Beta Agonist (Ractopamine) by Clean Screen® DAU

UCT is aware of the need for scientists around the globe to monitor the safety of the food we eat. In light of this, UCT has always produced sorbents of the highest quality and efficiency for over 25 years. The flagship of these sorbents is the Clean Screen® DAU, which is the most popular SPE product on the market for extracting drugs from biological fluids and tissues, in both human and animal.

This efficiency for extracting Ractopamine from animal tissue has recently been reported (J. Chromatography B (e-published March 2012)) by Dr. Ana Vulic (Croatian Veterinary Institute, Zagreb) and the staff of the Institute. In this report Dr. Vulic's team analyzed the retina's of food producing pigs that had been dosed with low level concentrations of the drug and compared the levels with non dosed animals. It was found that in using Clean Screen DAU quantitative measurements of ractopamine were able to be made using a LC-MS/MS technique. The team was able to recover over 95% of the drug from the matrix with minimal matrix effects. This is another clear demonstration of the power of this sorbent when employed in the area of drug extraction and isolation.

Analysis of Cocaine in Post Mortem Samples Using Clean Screen DAU SPE

Post mortem samples present the toxicologist with more challenges than most samples seen in forensic laboratories. The condition and volumes of the matrix can add to difficulties to be overcome. UCT is keenly aware of these issues, and for more than 25 years has offered forensic toxicology analysts the best solution with the well-known Clean Screen DAU Solid Phase Extraction column. This SPE material is unsurpassed, not only in its range of analytes, but in its efficiency in isolating from a wide variety of post mortem matrices. In the recent issue of Journal of Analytical Toxicology (March 2012, pp 141-143) Dr. Juhascik (UMass Memorial Hospital, MA) and his team report the finding of a isopropyl artifact in post mortem samples. The samples were comprehensively and completely analyzed for the presence of cocaine and metabolites. This work follows Dr. Juhascik's work comparing the efficiencies of liquid-liquid extraction vs SPE (Journal of Analytical Toxicology (2009 , 47, 553-557) where they determined that SPE (using Clean Screen DAU) far exceeded the liquid-liquid extraction in performance and efficiency.

ß-Agonist from Denmark

Just got word from a lab in Denmark that they are successfully using our CSDAU506 column to determine ß-Agonist's in farm and slaughterhouse animals. We are always pleased to service and support our customers worldwide! They loved our website and continually stopped by for the latest information on solid phase extraction and its neighboring markets.

Two New Posters at SOFT 2010 (Booth #9,10,11)

At the 2010 annual meeting of Society of Forensic Toxicologists, held in Richmond, VA, UCT Inc. will be presenting two new posters. This work has been performed in collaboration with a major crime laboratory facility. These posters demonstrate the wide range versatility of the world renowned Clean Screen DAU SPE column.

The first poster describes the use of this SPE column for analyzing both Psilocybin and Psilocin in urine using LC-MS/MS. Until now, analysts facing a "magic mushroom" intoxication have only been able to determine the concentrations of the metabolite either by GC-MS or LC-MS/MS using SPE, but with this new methodology they will be able to perform analyses providing valuable data on both compounds.

The second poster describes the analysis of Phenazepam in a whole blood sample. Although relatively uncommon in this country, this drug has been found in Central Europe. More recently, it has been found in drugs/driving cases in the US. The information contained in the poster will help analysts perform an efficient procedure using the famous Clean Screen SPE column.

We will be located at Booths #9,10,11. We look forward to seeing everyone!