Soon after a recent research story on the anti-convulsant prescription drug pregabalin which said the drug had failed to stop neuropathic pain as a result of HIV or diabetes (link to story) crossed my desk, I received an email about a new simple, rapid and sensitive liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry application for the bioanalysis of pregabalin (link to NIH site on the drug) in human plasma! Pregabalin is used to treat neuropathic pain as a result of damaged nerves from diabetes, shingles, and dibromyalgia among other conditions.

After some of the recent posts on pharmaceutical analysis, this one crossed my desk and I thought it interesting enough to write about and add to the growing number of chromatography applications for pharmaceutical analysis on this blog. This new gas chromatography (GC) method was developed by our analytical chemists in our Milan office in Italy for the analysis and quantifying of residual solvents in pharmaceutical products and excipients as a result of the production process specified in the U.S. Pharmaceutical Method <USP> 467 (link to method). In this method, concentration limits are set for each solvent, and 53 solvents are analyzed and grouped according to their health hazards, including Class 1 (most toxic and unacceptable), Class 2 (associated with less severe toxicity), and Class 3 (less toxic).

The chemists used our new valve-and-loop autosampler system (Thermo Scientific TriPlus 300 Headspace Autosampler) that simplifies headspace analytical methods, and when combined with our Chromatography Data System (CDS) software (Thermo Scientific Dionex Chromeleon CDS software) to develop the method which meets the analytical requirements of the USP Method 467 with full auditing capability.

This is one of my favorite type of blog posts: a useful compliementary giveaway that be used by chromatographers for quick reference and thus making their jobs easier!

I recently sent out an announcement about our new vial closure systems and then realized perhaps our blog readers would probably love to try one out for free and not just take us at our word on how much better sealing the new closures provide! (Details on how to order your sample are below.)

I am really pleased to feature our recently released  combined Titration/Ion Chromatography (IC) system for the testing of drinking, surface, or ground water. This new system combines titration with IC analysis for a completed analysis in as quickly as 20 minutes!

This blog post features a new application for an area constantly in the news: toxic air pollution. Stories in recent weeks have ranged from air pollution being linked to chronic heart disease, studies saying that the pollution from open-fire cooking may affect child cognitive development, and a USC study that says short-term reductions in air pollution in Beijing dramatically improved health! (Actually, just googling the words "toxic air pollution" brings up almost 10 million results.)

It is important to ensure there are no residual solvents in pharmaceuticals. If you have to ask why then you have not done a lot of work with solvents. Solvents that are used in the production of pharmaceuticals you do not want in your body, we will just leave it at that. The real questions should be

We’ve talked about the autosampler and heard from the Product Manager.  We’ve also seen the gas chromatograph and had a quick review from the Director of Product Marketing for GC GC-MS.  Now we will combine these new products with others that have been available for a little while.  What we describe here is a set of tools to get your work done faster, easier and with less waste.  It’s the less waste that saves the money and time.

After the sample is injected by the autosampler the gas chromtograph begins to do its work.  I have talked about this new instrument before but it is worth mentioning again.  No this is not more of the use of the Force, that only works on the weak minded and I have yet to meet anyone in the lab that is weak minded. 

OK, just so everyone understands I am in Marketing.  However, my job is not just to get you to buy products.  I do not have the ability to use the force, although that would be cool.  Marketing teams at Thermo Fisher Scientific do a major amount of work in identifying and coming up with ideas for the next set of instruments, software, consumables, or service offerings.  All of these are designed to provide you with some, or multiple, benefits to you and your lab or process.  Our job is to bring in the ideas, the researchers, engineers and designers make that a reality.