We Use Today's Best Technology to Speed Drug Discovery and Development

Ricerca can help you harness the power of mass spectrometry. The high selectivity, specificity, speed and accuracy of LC-MS/MS make it possible to rapidly screen drug candidates both in animals and in vitro to get important data used to select and prioritize lead drug candidates. One currently popular drug discovery tool that screens for effects of compounds on liver enzyme activities is the Cytochrome P450 assay.

Ricerca recognized that the massive number of compounds being passed through this screen create a bottleneck in the discovery pipeline. To help speed up this lead selection process, our Advanced Mass Spectrometry Laboratory developed a high throughput in-line extraction of drug and metabolites from biofluids such as blood, plasma and urine. This method significantly reduces the time and cost of sample preparation and analysis by eliminating pre-injection sample clean up. Our high throughput in-line extraction LC-LC-MS/MS method allows direct injection and on-line clean up of the sample. 1

Other successful applications of our high throughput in-line extraction LC-LC-MS/MS method have been in vivo pharmacokinetic screening and bioavailability studies using cassette dosing.

1 A High Throughput and Automated In-Line Extraction LC-LC-MS/MS Method for the Quantitation of Dextromethorphan and Its Three Metabolites in In Vivo Studies, Tiang-Shen Lu, Thomas J. Fitzgerald, Stephen R. Beck, David A. Hartman, and Yong-Xi Li, World Millennial Congress, San Francisco, CA, April 16, 2000.