Drugs of abuse with multivariate intermolecular properties analyzed by polymeric mixed-mode cation exchange

With prescription abuse rising concomitantly with licit pain management, the need to expand a wider degree of drug monitoring within a single method has been increasingly sought after. With the incidence or prevalence of drug abuse typically restrained to various classes of opioids, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids and amphetamines, the opportunity to isolate and identify analytes within these classes becomes effortless. This is in part due to the high degree of structural homology within each respective Drug of Abuse (DOA) class. Although the subtle dissimilar intermolecular traits can offer a remarkably different analgesic, anxiolytic or other off-label effects, their similarities often provide an opportunity for their isolation via pH modulation through common functional groups such as amines (opioids and stimulants) or imines (benzodiazepines).

In this poster Biotage demonstrates that a large urine panel, comprised of 43 DOA’s, from multiple drug classes, can be simultaneously screened by mix-mode cation exchange despite their disparate intermolecular traits, by thoughtfully selecting appropriate organic wash and elution conditions that simultaneously enable sample isolation and detection along with minimizing sample matrix effects.