Researchers at the Institute of Pharmacology, Medical School Hannover, are monitoring blood levels of individually tailored doses of therapeutic drugs
The Hannover researchers are using Applied Biosystems's API 2000 and API 3000 LC/MS/MS systems in their work.
Volkhard Kaever, head of the therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) group, explained: "We are using LC/MS/MS techniques for TDM of immunosuppressive, antiviral and antibiotic drugs in our research studies.
"These techniques are widely accepted as the gold standard method for quantification of immunosuppressive drugs, and we are now using them to investigate toxicity of these and antiviral drugs.
"We are also using in vitro and in vivo experiments to try and understand the molecular mechanisms of unwanted side effects of these drugs.
"With the robust and sensitive API 2000 and 3000 LC/MS/MS systems, we can quickly and simultaneously measure four immunosuppressive or nine antiretroviral drugs within a single run, avoiding tedious clean-up times or cross-reactivity issues.
"We can establish LC-online SPE-ESI-MS/MS methods with total analysis times of just a few minutes that effectively manage the matrices."
