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Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
on DBS

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Complete systems quantitative analyses high sample

Doping Control

There has been a great dynamic around TDM related to DBS for the last 5 years. Personalized health care is a big topic in the pharma industry and DBS is a well-suited technique to monitor a patient’s drug uptake (ADME studies). Drugs that are required to be taken long term are especially appropriate. Enabling an “at home” sampling for patients would bring significant cost reductions and comfort for the patients [1]. The implementation of DBS-analysis avoids the requirement that patients need to visit the hospital several times to draw up to 5 mL of blood for plasma testing. With DBS, patients can draw samples by themselves at home and send them via standard mail to a centralized laboratory. Also, the correct administration of drugs can be monitored very easily by DBS [2]. Therefore, there is a clear trend of using DBS for monitoring anti-cancer drugs, antiretroviral drugs, antiepileptic drugs, immunosuppressive drugs, etc.

Illicit Drug Control

Urine is the preferred biological fluid to analyze the most commonly used performance-enhancing compounds. The collection of this biological fluid is non-invasive and cheap. However, blood testing is becoming more and more popular within the anti-doping and sports organizations, and thus the detection of forbidden substances or their metabolites in blood was included in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) prohibited list [1]. Blood analysis was not convenient for large-scale screening in the past, but with new DMS methods, it will replace the urine analysis to some extent, since for certain compounds it is more accurate and non-metabolized drugs can be found. Blood analysis provides a snapshot of the compounds in the bloodstream at the moment of sampling, whereas urine reflects the degradants of the compounds used over several days. There is a tendency that more and more DMS methods will be implemented within the next years, DMS will certainly gain popularity in this market.

[1] A. J. Wilhelm, J. C. G. den Burger, and E. L. Swart, “Therapeutic Drug Monitoring by Dried Blood Spot: Progress to Date and Future Directions,” Clin. Pharmacokinet., vol. 53, no. 11, pp. 961–973, 2014.

[2] M. H. U. Duthaler, B. Berger, S. Erb, M. Battegay, E. Letang, S. Gaugler, S. Krähenbühl, “Automated high throughput analysis of antiretroviral drugs in dried blood spots.,” J Mass Spectrom., vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 534–542, 2017.

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