Challenges involved in running MS based assays in Clinical Environments

Diagnosis by separation science techniques has never been overly common within the therapeutic drug monitoring community for a variety of reasons. These include the capital cost of equipment, the lack of either separations science applications knowledge within clinical laboratories and the lack of clinical knowledge / relevance of results within the separations and spectroscopy communities. Yet the use of admittedly sophisticated equipment such as LC or GC-MS systems can be utilised to provide highly specific, rugged, fast and accurate assays within clinical laboratories providing the correct strategy for implementation is devised. Indeed with ?Black Box? Instrumentation, ?Sample in, results out ? and don?t worry about what?s going on in between? the lack of specialist knowledge as outlined above may not be a problem and the benefits of chromatography and spectroscopy can be applied to the service that the Clinicians supply. Bernie Monaghan our Separations Science and Spectroscopy editor paid a visit to Neil Leaver, Head of Department, and Jane Tiller, BMS3, at the Immunosupression Monitoring Service at Harefield Hospital. We discussed how they actively embraced the benefits that LC-MS brings to their service, how they set about implementing their systems and how they see the future.