Development of miniaturized liquid-phase separation systems combined with sample preparations and coupled to mass-spectrometry for pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis

Abstract

Discovery and development of new drugs, toxicological and forensic analyses, as well as disease diagnosis have been pushing the analytical chemistry field in order to find adequate tools to solve their problems. Thus, there is the need to develop strategies and techniques not only with high resolution, but also able to attend a high number of samples. The coupling of liquid chromatography (LC) and mass spectrometry (MS) techniques has been shown great potentiality to solve that sort of problems previously mentioned. The miniaturized branch of these techniques has demonstrated advantages such as higher sensibility and lower sample and reagents consumption. In this way, the miniaturization associated with new strategies to integrate sample preparation shows a strong appeal as a promising high throughput technique. The applicant of this project gained experience with miniaturized multidimensional techniques and coupling of those with mass spectrometry during his PhD, especially during a one-year study stay in Sweden. Therefore, the aim of this project is the development of confident analytical tools able to process complex sample with high throughput. This project is part of a Thematic Project dealing with the development of miniaturized instrumentation; and it is going to interact with other more fundamental projects and generate instrumentation, strategies, and applications dealing with pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis. Basically, capillary liquid chromatography (cLC) and nano-LC, electrochromatography (CEC), and their multidimensional coupling to MS are going to be developed in their state-of-art joining monolithic column technology and other strategies to achieve high efficiency.